Help us save Cricket's eye.

We are raising money to put towards lesson horse Cricket's vet bills. We want to be able to do everything we can to try to save Cricket's eye. She is an in house patient at Dr. Dunlap's clinic having 24/7 care. Here is what has been done so far to help treat her eye injury.

Cricket has a severe melting corneal ulcer with a fungal keratitis. So there are four issues we had to tackle. 1)severe pain and blepharospasm (heavy squinting), 2)big injury to the cornea, the outer layers of the eye with layers like an onion. 3)bacterial infection with bad enough bacteria that the bacteria were releasing enzymes actually eating away at or "melting" the cornea into goo. 4)fungal infection which can be aggressive and difficult to manage

Step one-the large defect in the cornea can be seen. At this point she had been sedated and given pain medication and her eyelids were numbed and her eye was numbed as well with topical drops and this little instrument allows us to get full access to the eye injury.

Step two-her eyelids are being very gently cleaned to allow for placement of what we call an eyelid catheter which allows for continuous medication application to the eye but what is medically known as a sub-palpebral eye lavage kit.

Step three-Multiple applications of proparacaine drops are applied to the eye to numb the eye for corneal debridement surgery. In this surgery a soft saline soaked cotton tipped applicator is used to roll off the dead cornea. Fungus and bacteria can populate and hide within dead cornea so this needed to be removed to immediately cut down on the contaminants in the eye.

Step four-There were several large chunks of dead cornea that had to be cut off of her cornea very carefully.

Step five- Now the corneal injury has been trimmed back to healthy adhered edges and we are now done with the corneal surgery and ready to put in our eyelid catheter so that we can provide 24/7 around the clock treatment to her eye.

Step six-Once the eyelid catheter is placed, we can now treat her eye every couple of hours 24 hours a day. We use several different medications including high-powered antibiotics and antifungals to combat the severe infection while creating a healthy environment for the cornea to heal as quickly as possible. In this final photo the finished eyelid catheter can be seen woven into her mane via braids to allow us to stand back at her shoulder using the end of the line as a catheter to administer her medications. This keeps us from having to mess with her eye and cause her undue pain and allows us to very gently slowly apply medications so that her eye gets the medications that it needs frequently without stressing her out too much because she can be eating her hay while we are treating her eye and if done right they barely notice.

Thanks in advance for your contribution to this cause that means so much to us.