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Stella's Prognosis, Surgery and Recovery

About a year after Stella's nip/tuck (her regular vet performed a tacking- pulling the loose skin around her eyes, while she was already under anesthesia for her spay. The stitches were dissolvable, there was no discharge, she didn't even wear a cone) we noticed her eyes dripping frequently again. Some days were a lot worse than others and the car always made them run more than usual. As mentioned in a previous post, our regular vet advised us to get the surgery again when she saw the Entropion still present. Before we had time to consider, we were faced with a much bigger problem; After months of sickness, Stella was about 1.5 years old, and diagnosed with Addison's Disease. I have toyed with the idea of blogging about that, but that is a project for the future.

What prompted us to choose surgery now was the persistence of our very trusted regular vet, Stella's internal medicine doctor, and several ER doctors that we tend to see every holiday weekend. At 4.5 we had finally finally got her Addison's under control, we found a great team of doctors and were told that without it, since she's getting older, she'd be a risk for eye diseases and even blindness. Due to the damage the Entropion has done, Stella has residual cloudiness that will probably never go away. Our thought process was to do it now, at almost 5, on our terms. We had it planned for about 6 months choosing a time where neither her Addison nor our schedules would be too affected.

I'd say that Stella's recovery is much harder than I thought it would be.
The recovery schedule looks something like this:
I was telling a neighbor about how long it takes us to get through all of Stella's necessary routine and she said, "wow that is quite a commitment" it most definitely is. We have not let Stella out of our sight since  the procedure. yes, we are helicopter parents. Yes, we are neurotic, but we are realistic too. Most problems with recovery come from trauma post surgery. We know our dog's personality. She is unfazed by her eyes as she barrels through the door to go outside. She has no concept that she has a cone on her head inhibiting her movement. Our good friend, whose Berner just got her ACL repaired predicted that Stella would be heavily medicated throughout her recovery, or at least a little loopy. She's neither of these. I asked for the sedatives. For both of us.

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