Right now, I’m supposed to be starting an MA in crime fiction.[1] I say ‘supposed to be’ because we’ve had to spend my MA Savings Pot on the Hound (see Dog Days and Nothing but a Hound Dog), who has been an unwilling participant in a very slow and unnecessarily realistic folk production of King Lear. I offer an account of his recent medical issues as a partial explanation for both my lack of MA-starting and the fact that I haven’t posted anything on the blog since the general election.
I am terribly squeamish about bad things happening to my eyes, and the eyes of those I love. The scene in Quantum of Solace where the guy has his eyes poked out just before his neck is broken was (just about) short enough that the wave of nausea wasn’t enough to make me actually throw up; the subsequent neck-breaking was an act of mercy for both him and me. When I was a student, I skipped the Dept. trip to see Oedipus Rex because I thought there was a good chance I’d reintroduce everyone to my lunch, if not prompted by the sight of eyeless Oedipus itself then certainly by anticipation of the same. Any production of King Lear (other than the one going on in the Oval Office right now, of course, which doesn’t induce nausea so much as despair)[2] forces me to remind myself that it’s not real; it says something for the power of the suspension of disbelief that this is necessary. Recently, I was proofreading a thesis about ‘in yer face’ theatre, a nihilistic modern genre that includes graphic depictions of sex and violence. Most of the seminal (fnar fnar) works were, unsurprisingly, written in the 1990s, and the thesis included a long and detailed analysis of, among other things, at least one character being blinded: his eyes are literally sucked out of his head by another character. You’d think a vacuum cleaner would be a useful capitalist symbol to reach for here, but no: he uses his mouth, like those Greek fishermen that bite octopodes in the brain.[3] I’m a professional, so I read it and marked it up, including correcting the horrible word ‘enucleation’, which is the technical medical term for removing an eye.[4] Having marked it up, I then had to go and have a little lie down and think about something (anything) else.
Knowing somehow that he would be enacting my greatest fear (apart from sharks, but fuck sharks), the Hound developed a bulgy eye. It wasn’t clear for several weeks what the problem was, but in the meantime he got bulgier and bulgier, until his eye was right outside the skull, held in by nothing more than two very stretched eyelids and hope. Remember Delacroix’s death in The Green Mile when he goes into the electric chair and his eyes pop out of his head on strings? It was like that, but as if the botched execution happened to Mr. Jingles (i.e. someone who didn’t in any way deserve it), in slow motion and (mercifully) without the burning smell. At one point, under the impression that our numerous trips to the vet were for some other purpose, the Hound put his paw on my knee and simply held his blind, swollen eye out to me, as if to say, I mean, look at this thing. It’s fucked. DO SOMETHING.
He must have been in terrible pain, and according to the vet, likely to have been suffering from nasal and auditory hallucinations from the pressure on his brain and his sinuses; certainly he spent a lot of time barking, apparently at Pain itself. After exhaustive testing and a load of dental work (his teeth were also popping out of his head. Rats leaving a sinking ship), it emerged that he had some form of growth in what is called the ‘cone’ i.e. the space immediately behind the eyeball. The eyeball has a number of blood vessels strung off the back of it, rather like one of those 1970s plant-pot-holder thingies people used to hang in their stairwells. The blood vessels form a cone; at the point of the cone they meet the optic nerve, which then joins the optic nerve from the other eye in a y-shape, and off we all go to the brain. It was, therefore, impossible to remove the Thing without also removing his right eye: the two were simply too deeply bound up in one another.
The Hound’s Thing (I’m not saying ‘tumour’ because it turned out not to be cancer, and I think the reader might feel the word ‘tumour’ implied that it *was* cancerous) was not the potato-shaped blob one might imagine, but a gnarly, sprawling, many-limbed affair. Moreover, it was growing so fast that his good eye (the left) was starting to turn inwards as the optic nerve reached the limits of its flexibility. Having removed both Thing and eye, the vet described it as ‘crunchy’ and noted that at least three (but probably seven) of the twelve teeth the Hound had lost in the preceding weeks had become loose because the Thing had grown down into the top of his gums and literally pushed them out by the roots, from the inside. It had then inserted a tentacle into each hole to allow it to go on growing: during the enucleation operation, each tendril had to be physically manipulated back up into the skull before the whole Thing could be removed from the Hound’s skull, through his eye socket. When my (amazing, patient) parents-in-law and I went to collect him, the Hound was noticeably lighter than the previous day. ‘He’s lost weight’, I commented to the veterinary nurse. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He’s lost about 500g [8% of his body weight, dear reader]. That’s partly because he’s missed several meals so we can operate, partly because he threw up his dinner, and partly because the tumour weighed nearly 300g.’ The vet confirmed this, saying that if he had scrunched the nasty Thing into a ball, it would have been nearly the size of a satsuma i.e. only slightly smaller than the Hound’s entire brain. ‘It was so astonishing when I finally got it out that I was going to take a photograph and email it to you. Then I realised it would give you nightmares,’ the vet observed. He’s not wrong.
Peco (or Pequod as we call him now that he looks even more like a pirate) has bounced back from the whole ordeal magnificently. He only walks into things now and again, and has become comically bad at judging distances; like all dogs, having fallen down or tripped over nothing, he immediately behaves as if no such thing just happened and cheerfully goes on with whatever he was doing. He also asks for cuddles far more readily. This includes being picked up and (very slowly, so that he doesn’t get dizzy) waltzed around the room, ideally to I Only Have Eye(s) For You, by the end of which he has usually dozed off. One of the vets we took him to advised us to have him put down ‘because he won’t have much of a life with one eye’, clearly not understanding how completely spoilt this dog is (also, the Hound had just bitten him savagely on the hand). The Hound sleeps in our bed, washes in our bath (which he adores, especially if you spray the shower-head right into his tiny face) and sits on our sofa. He goes on holiday with us; we pick up his poo; and I spend more time with him than with any other living creature. This evening, his dinner was giblets fried in butter, following by all the stringy bits of the roast chicken too good for the stock, all of which he ate at great speed and with little grunts of satisfaction. He is one-eyed, velvety-soft and very contented. We could not love him more.
[1] It’s this one (the only such MA in the country). I know, right? The most (academic kind of) fun ever. Fun With Essays, if you will.
[2] I’m not even joking. Did you know Trump literally makes his aides go around the room and say something nice about him before they start meetings? Come, which of you shall we say doth love us most?
[3] Octopuses would be fine, because octopus is a Greek word extracted into English and thus is both English and Greek. We can, therefore, form the plural according to either language, but personally I think English plurals on Greek words are ugly, and thus prefer octopodes. ‘Octopi’ is just a piece of pseudo-learned nonsense and should not be used in any circumstances: it’s a Latin plural that assumes octopus must be a Latin word because octo is common to both languages, and thus has tried to make a Latin plural on a Greek/English word. Here’s a nice lady from Mirriam-Webster to back me up.
[4] My customer had, rather touchingly, spelt it ‘enucleartion’, which I feel out to be the term for removing an extraneous eye that is the result of being exposed to large amounts of radiation, like the many-eyed fish in Springfield.
the filthy comma 
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