Pictures: Conehead Cowboy

As I mentioned before, Cowboy has been wearing a cone for the past two weeks. He had to get surgery on his eye to fix his entropion -- an inward rolling of his eyelid. His lower lashes were rubbing against his eye and causing ulcers to form, so the doctor performed a little nip and tuck to roll his eyelids back out. Since he was already getting plastic surgery, I asked if they could also give him some botox injections to fill in the wrinkles on his forehead and maybe do a little "neck tuck" to get rid of those rolls of skin, but they didn't go along with my plan. Ah well. I guess an eye lift is better than nothing.

So life with the cone has been entertaining. I already described Cowboy's little couch-howling (is this the dog version of Tom Cruise's couch-jumping?) and his cone-mutilation episodes. He also managed to crack his cone in half when he tried to play "touchdown" (a game where he runs between our legs) with me and ran his cone smack into my shin at top speed. He scoops up dirt and grass when he tries to sniff, and routinely walks into trees which inevitably startles him.

We thought the cone would be off last Thursday, but when they took the stitches out, one of them split open. So the doctor left one stitch in and said we could take it out ourselves in 48 hours and start to wean him off the cone. We have to watch him carefully to make sure he doesn't scratch his eye, but it doesn't seem to itch him so we don't think it will be a problem.

In the meantime, Cowboy looks like a junkyard dog. In addition to the black eye with stitches, he's got the dirtiest, trashiest looking cone around -- bent out of shape and criss-crossed with duct tape to mend all of the cracks. That's our boy!

Link: View conehead pictures