A Memoir by Nadeen L. Kaufman

We flew in from New York City and landed back home in San Diego in the early afternoon, so there was enough time to rush over to the vet with Disco. One glance at her and I immediately knew her eyeball was swollen enough to burst any minute. What had happened?  The dog sitter said nothing about her eye looking strange. The vet took a pressure reading and sent us on to the Specialty Animal Hospital, where we saw a pet ophthalmologist right away.  Dr. Holmes was a quiet, no small talk kind of guy, maybe 5 feet tall, with a crisp British accent. He immediately knew it was glaucoma.  At first we tried the expensive human eye drops, many times each day, but it was continually getting worse.  My poor baby Disco suffered silently.  Dr. Holmes said we really needed to remove her eyeball and focus on saving the “good” one.

She lived the rest of her life with one eye socket sewed shut and getting eye drops in her one remaining eye. Three years after her surgery she lost sight in the other eye, but by this time she was desperately ill, so we euthanized her. Dr. Holmes sent a short letter of condolence. Years later, I still miss my sweet toy poodle terribly, but it is Dr. Holmes who haunts my thoughts.

Disco’s eye doctor visits with Dr. Holmes had been quick and startlingly simple:  a cotton ball held above her head, then dropped.  Did she follow the dropping ball with her eye?  Could she track anymore?  Always there was adjustment in her drops, usually more prescriptions added.  How did humans handle all the drops?  I couldn’t stand any eye drops and always missed, the liquid rolling down a cheek.

One day we came in for a different dog problem with one of our two puppies and in a hushed voice the receptionist told us that Dr. Holmes no longer worked there. I felt the instant sting of anxiety: what if one of the puppies needed his help someday? His nurse told me that he had been fired, of all surprises.  He was coming to work late, some days he didn’t show up at all… This was such a different story than the Dr. Holmes we had experienced for years.  We knew that he had graduated from the British Royal Veterinarian Academy and had the finest credentials here in California. People in his medical group spoke of him with respect for his surgical work. But he was impenetrable as a person. He never smiled or said an unnecessary word.

It must have been a few months after this that a local newspaper article reported that “CA vet dies in fire; suicide suspected.”  After researching him online I discovered that his 14-year-old daughter had committed suicide just a few months earlier, and he had subsequently been left by his wife.  I continue to be stunned by the unspoken, unknown personal life of the vet who had nearly been worshipped by me for treating Disco and giving us hope that a one-eyed dog could do fine, even a blind one.  But Dr. Holmes was given a much harder sentence in life and had no one to save him.

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Dr. Nadeen L Kaufman earned her BS in Education from Hofstra University and her doctorate in Neuroscience from Columbia. From 1997-2023 she was Lecturer at Yale’s Child Study Center in the School of Medicine. She has been an elementary school teacher, university professor, learning disabilities specialist, and founder/director of Psychoeducational clinics. She has authored or coauthored 10 nonfiction books, 18 psychological tests, and 100+ articles, chapters, and case reports. Her tests are used worldwide.