HEALTH MATTERS – Grass Seed, by Jennie Hegarty
Recently I had a real scare with Fabio – he is just one year old and a darling of a Bolognese. His daily morning habit is to nip out into the garden and explore his world. He particularly likes to wipe his face on the grass. I was with him watering the pots when I heard a yelp – he started shaking his head and my assumption was that he had either been stung or hurt his ear. He was very reluctant to let me go anywhere near his face but I persevered but could see nothing wrong.
He appeared back to normal but then started to yelp apparently for no reason he ate his food and apart from intermittent yelping was normal. The next morning I could see that his eye was inflamed so took him to the vet. The vet examined his eye and put local anaesthetic in to have a really good look – he could see nothing but as his eye was swollen and mucky he felt it was most likely a form of conjunctivitis so we had an antibiotic jab, oral antibiotics and antibiotic drops.
Over the next two days the eye became worse terribly swollen and pussy – I keep his coat long and it was hard to get near his face to examine him, I then noticed he was having difficulty seeing out of the ‘bad’ eye. At no time did he paw at his eye but he was becoming increasingly miserable. Back to the vet – he was admitted as an emergency – general anaesthetic so a sweep could be carried out of the back of the eye.
The vet found an enormous grass seed imbedded at the back of the eye and an ulcer at the front of the eye caused by part of the grass seed breaking off and damaging it. Home with more drops and eye ointment. Poor little Fabio it took several days for the eye to look better and on our last check up the vet couldn’t find any long term damage. However there has been an effect- because of the pain he was in he really is very apprehensive of people going anywhere near his face. We are working on that with lots of treats.
It was a horrendous experience but in all honesty I don’t think we could have done anything to prevent it. The seed was so big the vet gave it to me!
I think it’s worth just thinking ‘Grass seeds’ in the summer if the dogs appear in pain at all and getting them checked over quickly.
