What's a blocked tear duct look like?

Question

Joshua Broadwater · Answer

What does a blocked tear duct look like? In dogs, the most common way that these blocked tear ducts will present is usually with abnormal staining below, typically just one eye, as the blockage may just be one eye. You can occasionally see it in both eyes, but you'll see either excessive wetness or tearing below the eye or staining, where the fur looks much darker, so either brown or dark red in appearance, and that may be a clue that we have a blockage. The tear duct itself starts on the inner part of the lower lid at this area called the tear puncta. There's actually two of them, one up here, one down here, and then it actually goes down the tear duct into the nose, and then tears eventually just slowly come out the nose that we just don't realize it over time, and so a blockage could occur anywhere along that course, from anywhere up here near the tear puncta all the way down through the nose as well. So if we have a suspicion of a blockage, we may actually do a tear duct flush to see if it is blocked and nothing's coming out the nose, and then if that seems to be the case, then the next step may be further testing to image this area with either X-rays or a CT scan to try to see if we can find where the blockage may be and if that's something that we could treat and fix so that we can resolve it.

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"What's a blocked tear duct look like?"