Reo 0067

Adolescent Reo today! We took this baby boy in from Miami as a foster dog through BCGSR. Unknowingly, the night before, MDAS performed emergency surgery to remove his left eye due to an "infection" that can be seen in his first picture. He came home with a bad stitch job, in pain and without proper medication, and was absolutely terrified. We found out he had a skin infection that caused his hair to fall out, too. This wasn't our first foster dog with BCGSR, but he was the first dog I personally picked up and got to name (Reo for "right eye only", with tons of help from the pro, Shirley). Over the next few weeks we did our best to nurse him back to health to be adopted. His potential adopters kept falling through and we couldn't handle the emotional roller coaster just to be let down again. It wasn't fair, he deserved a good home. Eventually we decided that because people continually backed out on him, that we wouldn't let that happen again, and we welcomed him in to our pack. Today Reo is 1.5 years old, and he's a very happy, very spoiled boy. He's made it through 5 major surgeries throughout the past 14 months. We found out that he was likely younger than the estimated 13 weeks when we originally picked him up from MDAS, and that his eye infection was actually severe blunt force trauma (likely run over by a car) that crushed most of the left side of his body- which was the reason for two more surgeries on his left legs/hip joints (totaling 3 surgeries, including his eye removal, just because of an accident when he was a stray puppy, hardly two months old). He has overcome several obstacles in his short period of time on earth. He still has some vision/depth perception issues such as misjudging walking around a corner in the house, how wide a door gap is, and whether or not he can walk through screened lanais. It sounds bad but he shakes it off and keeps going, and it gives us a little laugh; he doesn't know any different. He's also a people's dog rather than a dog's dog. He's very smart, trained in German, has a lobster toy as a security blanket, and is the best swimmer I've ever seen. He has a puppy brother and a puppy sister and he can out-sass them both! We love him.