Eye ulcers

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Thistle

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My boxer has a persistant ulcer and saw a top opthalmologist today, who scratched his cornea with a needle and then fitted a contact lens.

Does anyone have experience of eye ulcers in dogs.
 
Yep ulcers in boxers are often tricky to treat. Most ulcers will heal with a few weeks of drops from the vets but boxers often pose more of a problem mainly because their eyes are quite large and so the the tear film is sometimes a bit thin in the middle so there is the tendency for the eye to be dry in the middle. Ulcers are always slow to heal because there is no direct blood supply to the front of the eye and the ulcer relies on healing substances diffusing across from the back of the eye.
The reason the ophthalmologist scratched the eye is that the edges of the ulcer are often very underrun with big pockets under the conjunctiva and gently scraping this away will aid healing. Sometimes this can be done chemically using phenol to burn the loose tissue away. The idea of the contact lens is as a bandage while the ulcer heals. My experience of contact lenses in dogs is they often fall out unfortunately. Another way of "bandaging" the eye is a third eyelid flap where the 3rd eyelid is literally stitched to the upper eyelid. It protects the ulcer during healing but also brings a blood supply to the front of the eye. I'm guessing you might have already had this done at your regular vets before going to the specialist as its quite a common practice. If all else fails then a conjunctival graft can be performed where a little bit of the pink tissue in the socket of the eye is stitched over the ulcer to fill in the defect and that might be an option for you if the contact lens doesn't work.
Also if the ulcer has been present for a while or is deep when it does finally heal it may leave a small white scar on the eye but this is unlikely to cause any real problems or affect vision in any way.
Hope you get it sorted, AJ
 
One of my girls had her stitches removed on Monday after having her 3rd eyelid stitched up for the last 10 days - not a pretty sight but seems to have done the trick and the vet says that although it can still be seen it will continue to heal.
Good luck with your boxer
 
My dog had really bad eyes in the years before she was PTS. She kept getting ulcers in one eye and had UVitis in the other. When her ulcers were bad we were putting in oinment every 4 hours. Although they cleared up they left the eye very cloudy.
 
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