Up to Him

Wrong.


The vet immediately took a serious look at the situation and quickly administered both a sedative and painkiller as he said that eye injuries are excruciating (ever poked yourself in the eye? Not a nice feeling).

At this point I don’t fully understand the situation. I hear words like ‘traumatic’, ‘blindness’, ‘infection’, ‘euthanasia’….I clearly remember catching that last one, and promptly breaking down.

This is my young, healthy, athletic three year old with all the potential in the world…beautiful, graceful, spirited…euthanasia does not fit into this picture. At all. This is my Traveller, my horse….this happens to other peoples horses, this is something you read about….this doesn’t happen to my horse.

Thankfully there was one clear head in the room, the vets. He said that yes, Traveller was now permanently blind in his right eye. That ‘goo’ we thought was coming out of the eye was actually his cornea that was now hanging off, covered in dirt from where he tried to rub his face to relieve the intense pain. The actual injury was a small three-corner tear in the middle of the eye…a puncture from something small and sharp. To this day we do not know what it was, we have ideas, but it will never be known for sure.

The vets advice was to give him a chance. Our number our concern was of course safety; if he was going to be a danger to himself or others we would have to make the decision to have him put down. Even in the excruciating pain, Traveller remained fairly calm, letting us catch him, load him, and walk into a strange place….he had trusted us to help him. The vet said that this is a good indication of his temperament and how he will handle life without one eye.

With this said, we decided to leave him at the vets for a few days where he could be monitored and receive the proper medications….and be in a controlled environment if his demeanour were to drastically change. It was up to him.

We drove home with an empty trailer and not a dry eye in sight.