May 14th, 2003 - Wednesday

Eye spy

Today Hayley had a follow-up appointment with the optometrist for her eye. Both the technician and the doctor were really pleased with how much her right eye is. The eye turns in quite a bit less now than it used to and she alternates between seeing with the left or the right very well now.

The big problem is that she IS only using one or the other. She never sees with both eyes at the same time. The patch and the glasses don't look like they're going to help that so she would always have a crossed eye (congenital esotropia) and she would never have binocular vision.

Close your right eye and look around with your left. Then close your left eye and look around with your right. That's how Hayley sees all the time - flat and with incorrect depth perception.

I was rather thrown for a loop when the doctor said that she would be scheduling her for surgery in late June.

Surgery?

When we took her in for the very first appointment when she was only a few months old, the doctor said we'd do patching on the strong eye to make the weaker one work harder. I also knew that she was going to have to wear glasses. It made me pretty sad since I wore glasses from 2 and a half years old until I was 17, when I got contact lenses. However, glasses these days are really different from when I was a kid. Hayley's glasses aren't thick at all and they're very stylish.

The surgery, as far as I had understood it, was to be a last resort and it sounded like something that was barely even an option. Maybe the word "surgery" was just too scary to let myself think about, so maybe I made myself see it that way. Either way, the doctor seemed surprised by MY surprise and seemed to imply that this was understood to be the most likely option.

I don't know. Maybe she thought she had told me about it before and forgot that she hadn't.

In any case, I asked a ton of questions. What I like about this doctor is that she doesn't seem bothered or offended by any questions, even if they appear to question HER specifically. She also never makes me feel stupid for things that I really need to ask.

The surgery is completely optional. They would put her to sleep and make tiny incisions - incisions so small that you won't even see them when they heal - and adjust the muscles on the eyeballs so that they straighten the eyes out. This will allow her to see straight and to see with both eyes at once. Although she may experience a bit of light sensitivity shortly afterward, the effects should be pretty much immediate and we should see a major difference in her eyes right away.

It's a very non-serious surgery. It's quite common. I found out that a cousin of mine had it done when she was a child and she's older than I am so it's been around a long time (I never had it done because apparently my lazy eye was not the same type of problem and surgery wouldn't have helped at all). I did some research on it today (the joy of trying to find google results for "bilateral medial rectus recession" that explain it in a layman terminology!) and found out that it's rather common to be performed on children between seven months and two years. Hayley will be nine months at the time.

It makes me nervous, to say the least. Anesthesia always carries risks, and she's so tiny. The doctor told me that the risks are much higher when the baby is under six months and so I don't really need to worry, but I'm a mother. That's MY baby. Of course I'm worried.

Tomorrow I'm going to call my pediatrician and ask what he thinks - whether he thinks we should go for it now, whether it's safe, or whether he feels that we should wait until she's older.

I'm figuring that we'll probably go ahead with it as scheduled unless the pediatrician really thinks that we shouldn't. It won't replace her need for glasses. She still needs corrective lenses but this may stop them from worsening and it will make her vision work better overall. I hate to think of her always seeing the world in two dimensions.

In the meantime, I have to keep getting her to wear her glasses as much as possible. It's hard because she is much more fond of chewing on them than wearing them but she IS getting better. As long as I distract her and keep her hands away from her face, she seems to forget about them for awhile. Then she'll pull them down to her mouth and I just have to say "no" (yeah, that works) and put them back on and distract her some more.

It's not a big deal, it really isn't. It's a 90-minute procedure and she comes home the very same day. Still, it's going to be the longest 90 minutes of my life and I wish that I could do it for her.

At least she'll come out of it with a whole new perspective - literally - on the world around her.

Hayley sitting on a chair like a big girl at the doctor's office today.