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Red Eye- an article about conjunctivitis. One of the farmers’ wives from the village where I live asked me the other day if I would have a look at her dog’s eye because she was a little concerned about it. She’s a beautiful Dalmatian, getting a little old but still giving her younger and equally spotty friend, Maisy, a run for her money. She’d been squinting for a day or two with her left eye and had some discharge which was not normal for her. I took a few bits and bobs from the surgery and nipped round on my way home. She came to greet me as normal and soon realised that I was there on business and decided to go to bed rather rapidly! Once we’d extracted her I looked at her face from arm’s length and it was quite noticeable that she was holding one eye slightly more closed than the other. On closer inspection I could see that the membranes around her eye and the white of her eye on that side were all bloodshot. It looked like there was a scratch on the surface but to be sure I would have to use one of our favourite ‘cool’ tricks. I dropped some dye into her eye which goes fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. The idea is that if there is damage to the surface the dye sticks to the edges of the scratch but can’t stick to the normal, shiny corneal surface. We got her in a dark corner and I turned on the special lamp and this is why we love it; as if by magic a large scratch appeared beautifully highlighted in bright, alien green. The predicted oohs and aahs ensued and we opened the curtains again. Once I’d checked with a scope that nothing else was going on we gave her some soothing antibiotic drops and her ‘mum’ was instructed to continue those for five days and until we’d repeated the test to make sure the ulcer (scratch) was healed completely. This is a pretty common injury in dogs. Often it’s a scratch from a piece of undergrowth or an encounter with a cat and the majority of them heal very quickly. The odd one needs some surgical intervention to get rid of any dead tissue delaying things but thankfully that’s rare. Sure enough when I popped back a few days later she was back to her normal bright-eyed self and keeping the whipper-snapper in check.
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