Looking Into the Future

If you’d have asked me a week ago, or even two days ago, whether I would rather know about a possible health problem that one of my dogs would face in the future, the answer would have been a pretty resounding YES.

Now, I’m not sure about that.

We received Smokey’s health and breed results from his Embark test just yesterday. We are excited to report that he is 100% Australian Cattle Dog, as we had suspected and even hoped.

But what we weren’t counting on was finding out he has two copies of the gene for Progressive Retinal Atrophy. So, there is a strong likelihood that our boy will go blind. It may be as soon as when he’s three, or it may wait until he is a senior pup. We can only hope for the latter.

Knowing isn’t helpful with this particular condition, because it’s genetic. There is no cure, and there is no treatment. As it stands, once his vision loss begins, he’ll have maybe a year or two before being fully blind. The good part of all this, is that since it’s progressive, and dogs rely so heavily on sense other than sight to experience the world, his ability to adapt to his new reality will make it much less of an issue than blindness would be in a human.

Right now, with only a day to process this information, and an overwhelming amount of sadness about it, I don’t know that I’d rather know. I’d like to look at his happy little face, and blissfully smile along with him. Maybe I’ll get to do that for years and years, before any of this is any more real than it was last week.

But a part of me now feels like there’s a time bomb waiting to go off, and I want to take every chance to gaze into his puppy dog eyes while I can.

I know there’s a world of information out there, and I intend to go find it. Just not yet. For today, I just want to look into my boy’s eyes and promise him that I will never abandon him.