Eye injuries

Eye injuries can present in different ways. There may be a small cut, there may be a tear, you can get eyelids that are torn, or you can get quite catastrophic injuries where the actual eyeball is prolapsed and these can happen, or more likely to happen in dogs that are short nosed breeds, say the brachycephalics. But it can happen in any dog and if you get a trauma that is hard enough and the impact is hard enough, there is that risk that the eyeball will actually prolapse. We will start off talking about cuts. You would not try and bandage an eye. It is not necessary to do that, and your dog will not appreciate you doing that. This is obviously a very severe wound here where the eyeball isn't even there anymore, and in those situations, if it's bleeding, you would want to stem the bleeding and potentially just hold a package on there, pads or something, just to try and stop that bleeding. But in other wounds, if you just have a tear or a torn eyelid down here, I would encourage you to try and clean it, but don't try and tamper with it too much. The hope would be that we can join the sides of the eyelid back together if it is seen soon enough.

So the thing to do would be to just get your dog to the vet as soon as you can, and they would then do what they needed to do. If you had something like an eyeball prolapse, you want to try and protect that eyeball as much as you can, because we can get those eyeballs back in some dogs and they can be perfectly visual and fine as long as we get it back in place as soon as we possibly can.

So with those, you do want to protect them, if you can use a pad, you would want to soak it in saline or water. You do not wanna put these pads dry onto an eyeball. So if you have a first aid kit and you have a port of saline, you can put that onto a dressing and then place that on the eyeball just to protect it. You're not trying to replace it, you're just protecting it until we can get the dog seen at the vets. You may want to just hold that on, you could try and possibly, if you had an eye-patch bandage, or had a little bandage attached to it, you could try and attach that round the back of the head, but in most cases, you're just gonna need to hold that on and protect the eyeball as best as you can.