Albert, my neighbor, is “severely” deaf and his little terrier mix Pee Wee is “completely” blind: she has no eyes. Albert asked me to write a story about how this happened and suggested the title: “The Deaf Leading the Blind.”Albert and Pee Wee are inseparable. They live together in an immaculate trailer in El Valle. Pee Wee has a solar doghouse but she prefers the trailer. And since she lost her eyes, Albert prefers having her with him inside: “She’s my partner.”
Albert got Pee Wee about a year ago from a friend in Chamisal. She was supposed to be a present for his granddaughter, who was living with him at the time, but the granddaughter moved to Albuquerque so Albert ended up with Pee Wee. She used to run out onto the village road when I went for walks with my dogs and occasionally accompanied us up the llano. Even then Albert often took her with him when he went to Peñasco to hang out with his friends, or on a quick trip to Taos when she wouldn’t have to stay in the car too long, waiting.
One day she was in the car with him when he got out to lock the gate. She must have jumped out the door when he wasn’t looking and when he got back in and started up his driveway he felt a bump and then heard her cries. He stopped immediately and found Pee Wee rolling around on the ground with blood pouring out of her face. He picked her up and ran to his mother Corina’s house, next door. They washed the blood off Pee Wee’s face and tried to insert her eye back into its socket.
This is when the Salazar Clinic vets in Taos and Jeannie Cornelius of the Dixon Animal Protection Society come into the story. Albert rushed Pee Wee to the clinic where they immediately took her in but were unable to save her eye. Albert doesn’t have much discretionary money, but he paid what he could and left Pee Wee with the vet for a couple of days. He then took her home and she seemed to be doing OK, but about 10 days later her other eye swelled up and Albert took her back to the vet. This time he had no money so the clinic contacted Jeannie, the compassionate dog lady who runs an animal rescue service in Dixon, who agreed to pay the bill. The vets kept Pee Wee over the weekend, but the eye got worse, and when they told Albert that they’d have to remove it he broke down and thought, how am I going to take care of a blind dog? He considered euthanizing Pee Wee, but the vets told him how spunky she was and offered to try to find a home for her. One of the vets took the dog home with her and considered keeping Pee Wee herself.
But Albert couldn’t let her go. He built a chain link fence around his yard and came back to the clinic and took her home. A week later, which was exactly a month after he accidently drove over her, he took Pee Wee back for a final exam. The vets’ report read: “Looks great—doing well. Eyes look good—pulled stitch from medial aspect of (L) eye. Everything else [they had also spayed her] looks good. Very happy.”
So that’s how the Deaf Ended Up Leading the Blind. Pee Wee remains “Very happy,” at least as far as we humans can tell. She sits on Albert’s lap in the car. He feeds her high protein dog food. She follows him everywhere around the yard and occasionally bumps into things but regains her equilibrium after he whistles or claps his hands to let her know where he is. She sleeps in his bed at night. When I went over to get the vet report from Albert for this story Pee Wee and my dog Paco played together in the yard for half an hour, rolling around, first one on top, then the other, nipping, yapping, then running in circles.
Albert also got some medical help recently, a new set of hearing aids. They are outrageously expensive, and he can’t afford them, either. There’s no deaf person rescue service that we know of, so he’ll have to make payments for a long time to come. But now he can better hear Pee Wee’s bark when she wants to alert him that she needs help or someone is coming. He wants to thank everyone who helped him, financially, physically, and emotionally, through his ordeal with Pee Wee—an ordeal that in the end became a blessing.
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