Lucky

They say don’t name your dog Lucky. Dogs named Lucky are usually the one-legged, one-eyed, hard knock life kind of dogs. Well, that’s exactly why we did name our dog Lucky! Before moving to Cove Ridge, we lived in a rural setting over by the airport. There were always strays in our area. Skinny, hungry and thirsty strays. I always had a water bowl out for them and fed any that let me get near enough to do so. A new small bundle of light colored filthy matted hair appeared one day. It was so overgrown with hair you couldn’t see its eyes and it was so smelly. We started leaving food because it hung around longer than most of the other strays. My neighbor across the way was tending to it too. Winter was fast approaching and we also had a band of coyotes in the area. We were concerned for the little creature. My neighbor got close enough to grab it and took it to the vet to check for a chip. There was none. He learned that it was a male Shih Tzu with only one eye and that eye was badly scarred. He said he was going to take him to the pound unless I wanted him. Well, you know what happened next! We took the little guy. When he was on his own, he was so stand-offish and wouldn’t let me near at all. When the neighbor brought him to me to keep him, he jumped into my lap and couldn’t stop licking me. I know I’m probably imagining things but I think he knew he was safe and that his hard days were over. We gave him a bath but it only made him a wet smelly dog! He slept on a towel in bed with us and he rested so well. We took him to the vet and groomer the very next day. His teeth were so impacted with wood that several had to be pulled otherwise he was thin but in good shape. They said that he was loved by someone once because they had paid to have a prosthetic inserted where they had removed one eye and the job they did was amazing. The vet said they stitched him up so well, you couldn’t even tell he had an eye surgically removed. They estimated he was 6 to 8 years old (this was in 2009). They shaved him down, cleaned him up and gave him all his shots. He looked like a completely different dog – A tiny, white Shih Tzu. We took him to the eye specialist at UT Vet Center too. He only had one eye and we had to do what we could to keep it. He said the scarring was a wound on the eye that was infected and healed over. There wasn’t anything he could do for it. He said he had vision but probably poor at night. He was right and we came to learn that he had zero depth perception. He walked right off the edge of the bed, the edge of the yard, etc. While walking with our new dog in our old neighborhood one day, a neighbor stepped out and thanked us for taking the dog in. She said she saw the day a car drove up and dumped him on the road and took off without him! She said he sat there for a long time. That happened months before we took him in. I wonder how this poor little guy survived all that time. I wondered why he would always stop in that area when we took our walks. He’d just stand there a look around for a while and then start walking again. I stopped walking in that area to maybe help him forget. We also added a beagle (Lollipop) from beagle rescue and a stray black cat (Meow) from our old neighborhood too. We moved to Cove Ridge in 2015 with our little menagerie. Even though we had a small fenced yard, Lucky wouldn’t use it. He liked his walks. You probably had seen me walking with Lucky and Lollipop in the past. We’d be out 4 times a day regularly. Today, at an estimated 16 years old, he is almost completely blind in his one eye and almost completely deaf. Since going blind, Lucky no longer enjoys those walks. He started walking into the curb, into shrubs, etc. and would just stand still in the street I assume frozen with uncertainty. He uses the yard all the time now and that’s comfortable for him. You know our yards are small in size, easy for him to learn to get around and safe. His hard days are long behind him. He sleeps now in our bed or in his own bed equipped with a doggie electric blanket and his favorite toy! He runs the show around here too!And now you know why we named him Lucky!Angel and Barry Brown9916 Bellflower

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