Puppy Cones

My poor puppy is wearing a plastic cone.

The cone of shame.

I tried to take her photo to share with you here, but she looked at me with such sorrow and disappointment – as I was trying to capture her disgrace for public display, and I couldn’t do it. I put the camera away.

She needs the cone for a full 7 days, at the very least, following emergency eye surgery which she needed after my other dog ripped her cornea off during a period of intense puppy play.

The vet stitched her eyeball shut and sent her on her way with this opaque Elizabethan collar, which extends way beyond her nose, in the hopes that she won’t be able to scuff her eyeball across the carpet and rip up his handiwork.

The first night, I had to feed the poor baby kibbles out of my hand because she couldn’t figure out how to extend her tongue into the food bowl. Her puny puppy legs aren’t as tall as the cone and so she bumped and scraped her new head across the ground as she walked along.

But by the second day, she was starting to feel better. And then by the third day, she had come to accept the cone as a new part of her. She holds her head up high to jump up on the bed to give you morning kisses, and then she burrows under the covers just like she always has, but now her route is made clear by her 2-foot-wide plastic head.

Today is the fourth day, and I hiked with her in the rain. She has learned how to run with her head held high – unnaturally, freakishly high -  to keep the cone from scraping along. On the hills, she occasionally miscalculates the position of the ground, and her cone fills with mud and sand and rocks. But it doesn’t matter. Not to her.

When we cuddle at night, she feels left out a little, in her opaque world where peripheral vision is but a memory. But if you stick your face into her little world, she’ll lick you to pieces.

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