I Watched My Dog Go Blind
How I Found Myself Rushing to the Animal ER in the Midst of the Pandemic
It was a Tuesday in June, three months after the pandemic had uprooted our lives, and I had just wrapped up a day of working from home out of our apartment. My boyfriend, Dylan had left to play music with his brother, Connor for the first time in a long time. Around 4:20 p.m., he knocked on the sliding door that opened out onto the deck of our first-floor apartment, so that I could let him in, as we often did, to avoid having to go through two doors.
Garfunkel, our 10-year-old black Labrador greeted him at the door, ecstatic to see him, jumping on his back legs into Dylan’s arms with his front legs resting on Dylan’s stomach, furiously wagging his tail. Dylan, greeting Garfunkel, began to relay his day of recording music with Connor, and then sat down to play a few of the recordings of the tracks that they had made. After that, he went to take a shower.
Minutes later, while Dylan was still in the shower, I noticed Garfunkel acting strangely. He was snorting, and something was wrong with his right eye. He kept his left eye closed, seemingly unable to open it. I took a closer look, and saw that the eye socket of his right eye was drooping below his eyeball, revealing the pink underneath. It was an alarming sight.
Once Dylan came out of the shower, I brought Garfunkel’s eye issue to his attention. We walked to the living room together and tried to discern what to do. I sat on the couch and Garfunkel — all 80 pounds of him, jumped onto my lap, something that I had never seen him do before. It dawned on us that he needed immediate help.
Hurriedly, we loaded Garfunkel into the truck and rushed over to Wheat Ridge Animal Hospital. Like everything else, their intake process had changed dramatically since the onset of the pandemic. In our haste, we didn’t see the sign at the traffic circle that instructed us to wait in the car. I hopped out of the car with Garfunkel and we walked toward the sliding glass automatic glass doors, on which I noticed a sign that instructed us not to go inside. We waited, until a vet technician walked out of the doors and instructed us to wait in the car, so we got back in the truck where we waited inside in the traffic circle, just outside of the sliding glass automatic doors.
Then, a vet technician came out and handed us some paperwork and told to continue waiting in the car, but over in a specific part of the parking lot. We drove over to where she had shown us, where there were others waiting in their cars with their dogs.
We kept an eye on Garfunkel to make sure that he was still breathing. And we waited. We had no idea what could be wrong. We speculated, wondering if he might have had an allergic reaction to the new dog treats that we had bought him. We kept waiting. As it drew closer to his dinnertime, I fed Garfunkel some of his wet food out of my hand. He ate almost half a can of wet food hungrily, and then didn’t want any more.
I had ordered some sandwiches just after Dylan had come home to be delivered to our place for dinner. As we waited in the parking lot, I received a text message that the delivery driver was outside of our apartment with our sandwiches. I texted her back, letting her know that we were at the animal ER, and asked if she could please leave the sandwiches on our deck. She replied that she was sorry and that she would be happy to.
An hour passed. We were hungry. I kept thinking about the sandwiches waiting for us on our deck, hoping that no one would take them. We gave Garfunkel lots of pets, and kept watching him, worrying, wondering.
Then I heard a woman shrieking. We were 10 parking spots down from the hospital on our left, and the sound was coming from the car to our right, parked several spaces down.
“He’s having a seizure! He’s having a seizure!” she shouted. Soon enough, a vet technician was at her side and was helping her dog to the hospital.
I felt grateful. Grateful that the dog was being helped, and grateful that Garfunkel’s situation wasn’t as immediately dire.
Thirty minutes later, but after what felt like hours, a vet technician came out of the hospital with a leash for Garfunkel. Finally, we thought. Finally we’ll get some answers.
About twenty minutes after they had brought Garfunkel in, Dylan received a call. They didn’t have any answers. They prescribed Garfunkel some pills to help with pain and asked us to come back two days later.
