April 29, 2010

• No More Naps

  Yes, folks, it’s the end of an era: Jack has stopped napping. I knew this day would come — I’ve read that the precious nap usually ends at three, and most of Jack’s little friends have stopped napping. Up until a week or two ago, Jack was still sleeping for two hours in the middle of the day. Sure, he’d skip one here or there, but he was reliable for the most part, and also sleeping nearly 12 hours at night. Well, for the past 10 days, he’s been quietly reading in his bed (he gets out of bed and gets books from the bookcase himself) instead of sleeping. Unlike in the past, he doesn’t get crazy in the late afternoon without his nap. His nighttime sleeping is unaffected — still sleeping from 7 p.m. to a little after 6:30 a.m. — so I think all the signs are that Mr. Jack is done with his nap.

  Oh, but Mommy wasn’t done with the nap! Of course, Derek takes two naps a day. After lunch, we’re still enforcing quiet time for Jack, either reading in bed or playing quietly in the playroom.

  It’s hard to believe that naps are a thing of the past for Jack now. For so long, it was such a central part of the routine. Makes me a little sad: Seems like just yesterday, Jack was crawling all over the place, eating baby food, making cute babbling noises, napping. Now he’s a big kid, running everywhere, eating regular food, talking up a storm, and going straight from morning to evening without a nap. Oh, and wearing underwear — that’s a big one, too. Luckily, I still have one infant to cuddle.

  Speaking of babies, our furry child, Atari, was diagnosed with glaucoma in his right eye this week. It’s very sad. His right eye was totally bloodshot, and he kept it tightly closed. It first happened over a week ago, and our regular vet thought maybe he’d sustained some sort of head trauma (like bumping his head into a corner), and prescribed steroid eye ointment to help with the inflammation. That cleared it up, or so it seemed, but this past Monday, Atari was once again closing his eye, and his tail was droopy. Fellow Shiba owners know that when your Shiba’s tail isn’t curled, it means he’s in great distress. Atari also wasn’t eating much. So the next day, I took him into the vet again, where she said it looked like glaucoma. The pressure in his eye was so great that she referred me to a special dog and cat opthalmologist center as an “emergency” case. That afternoon, the ophthalmologist confirmed the diagnosis and performed 45 minutes of examinations on Atari’s eyes, including one where they put a huge glass thing directly ON Atari’s eyeball to look at the eye’s drainage system. They had to repeat that one about six times because his eye is so small, and the glass thing kept getting an air bubble under it. Atari was extremely patient. Now he’s on prescription eye drops, and we’ll see if those work. He seems to be feeling better. The worst-case scenario is blindness — he’s already lost some vision in his right eye.  Atari will be six years old in May, so he’s only middle-aged, but if glaucoma pops up in Shibas, it usually happens between ages 5 and 6. Luckily, Shibas are pretty hardy, so I hope Atari doesn’t suffer any other major problems. He is the world’s mellowest dog. I’m really hoping to preserve his sight as long as possible — we’re putting drops in his left eye preventively, too. June is going to be an optometrist in a year, so maybe we can hit her up for free drops, ha. She did say that glaucoma is extremely painful, it’s just that dogs can’t say it. Atari didn’t even whimper. So sad.

  If these drops don’t work, we’ll try something stronger. The hope is that he won’t exhaust the drop options before his life ends (he probably still has a good six or seven, maybe even more, years left). Otherwise, we’re looking at surgery, which is in the thousands of dollars. There’s an awesome laser surgery option that’s very new that would preserve sight and solve the glaucoma problem altogether (and prevent it from happening in his left eye), but that’s in the range of $5,000 per eye, and, well, we just don’t have that kind of money. And even if we did, it’d be hard to justify dropping $10,000 on a preventive surgery for our dog, as much as we love him. Drops and more traditional surgical options aren’t cheap, either, but they’re more affordable than the laser surgery. Anyway, he’s doing much better now, and we go for a recheck on Monday. Hopefully the ophthalmologist will declare him good with these drops, and we can stop worrying about it for a little while.

  • 6:41 pm
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