IS THAT OCULAR PROPTOSIS OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?

Reyna mid-eye-popping incident

Not many people are aware that our little Reyna is actually also South Texas born and bred.

She's one of the 3,000 spawn of my brother's family's chihuahuas, Dot and Li'l Boy.  She was shipped to us via Southwest airlines from Corpus to Seattle, at only 2 months old, a good two years before the monsters were even born.

When we moved from Seattle down to Cali a few years later, she was back in the air again, racking up those frequent flyer miles.  And although she travels well, this latest trip was not nearly as fun. For any of us.

Here recently, she and Ryce, our Weimaraner mix from New Orleans, have not been seeing eye to eye.  Literally, it would seem.  But Ryce is 13 years old.  Apparently, that's 65 in dog years. [I know, I know, I always thought it was just their years multiplied by 7, but evidently there's an actual formula you can use to figure it out. Or you can just plug their human years into this handy dandy calculator and not have to think.]

So, in her golden years, our Ryce is getting...well...a little bitchy.  She's lost most of her hearing, and her hips are beginning to weaken.  She has no time or patience for a chihuahua of any age.  But you might be surprised to hear that it's not Ryce that's doing the bullying 'round here.  It's the littlest diva and her apparent intolerance for the aged.  We've caught her several times snapping at Ryce, and although we have no proof of it, we're all pretty certain, that it was some variation thereof that led us to this latest incident.

After the kids had just experienced a pretty rousing and emotional movie in The Last Lions, watching a tiny water buffalo calf being taken down by a lioness, and, without spoiling the rest of the film, some other pretty brutal wild animal, survival of the fittest, only the strong survive experiences, we get home just in time to find Reyna running around with her left eye all bloodshot and popping right out of its socket.

Both kids screamed.  The timing seriously could not have been worse.  They were right back there in the movie theatre, crying and pointing and turning away from the scene, unable to process what was happening and why.

But I scooped her up and we were off to the vet immediately.

Proptosis due to ocular trauma, like a hard hit to the head or some larger jaws squeezing down on her face, perhaps, is evidently pretty common in smaller dog breeds.  That it had not happened before this was surprising to the vet.  To us...eh...not so much.  We were all perfectly happy with both her eyes set properly into their sockets, thank you very much.

Reyna $950 later...

But they anesthetized it and gave her something for the swelling before resetting it. She had to stay there overnight, but then could come right home. The vet said it's highly unlikely she'll be able to see out of that eye ever again (which immediately sent the children into a renewed round of tears and sorrowful cries), but there's still a chance that we may not have to have it removed completely if the eyeball is still viable.  We won't know that for a couple of weeks, though.

In the meantime, the kids are wondering if we're gonna be able to call her "Silver Eye," like one of the lionesses in the movie who also lost a battle she'd started.

Other than that, our little diva seems pretty pleased as punch at all the attention and extra treats she's been getting.  The kids try to show her affection, but it's like they're holding a 10-foot-pole. They don't wanna get too close.  They don't want any of the nasty goop that's dripping out of her eye to get on them.  And they don't want to even see the sutures, let alone hear me talk about them or watch me clean them.

And you know, I just don't think I ever really knew how skittish they were about these things.  And it's not something I'm really all that comfortable with, I'm finding.  In fact, it took just about everything I had not to yell at them to just suck it up and think about how the poor dog feels for one tiny second.  Well, yeah, okay, maybe that part did come out. A little.

But my goal this weekend is to get my brand new 8-year-olds to learn how to help me change her foot bandages, clean her eye, and apply warm compresses 2-3 times a day. City mice or not, these monsters are gonna need to strengthen their backbones.
...