2018 PUPS Digest

10 2018 PupsUnite.org Well it was quite a year for our canines and chickens alike. Lots of joy and lots of heartbreak. The first five months of 2017 I spent as little Stevie’s sole caregiver after he went completely blind in a matter of days in early December of last year. It was very difficult for him because not only did it happen so suddenly but also the cataracts had broken up and were causing ulcers on his eyeballs. He was on a daily dose of pain medicine and I had him at the vet two to three times a week for six months. We tried every medication available to get those ul- cers to heal but nothing worked. The last course of action was using his own serum spun down from his own blood as eye drops, which sadly had no effect. As the weeks passed he became less and less active…awake for perhaps an hour a day. If he was awake, I was by his side…always. His quality of life rapidly deteriorated once he could not see me any longer. He was the little man who would never let me out of his sight and the one dog that would ‘chase’ the chickens! Grasping at straws I inquired about having his eyes removed which was a desperate and stupid thought considering he was 16 years old with a heart murmur and a collapsing trachea. Even if he sur- vived the surgery, his quality of life would not have improved so we decided to do the most compassionate thing we could Witt’s End 2017