Sadness

-

Miss N had her second eye exam today. A year ago I found out she had a severe deficiency in one eye, to the point of having some permanent vision loss. I was a bit floored and did not ask at that appointment why or what that meant.

Today I did.

I am sad because had I caught her problem earlier, we might not have a permanent vision issue.

The doctor explained it like this: If you take a toddler and pin their arm to their chest, the muscles in the arm will atrophy. The eye is a muscle, and it gets exercise by visual stimulation. When the visual stimulation is not coming in accurately, the muscle atrophies. Therapy and glasses can help, but cannot restore the lost vision completely.

I realize this is not a serious issue. She can read, she can color, she can do puzzles, so obviously she can still see. I just wish we had caught it earlier. "Permanent vision loss" sound so, well, permanent and serious. I thought they screened preemies for these types of problems? Somehow she slipped through the cracks until age 4, when I went with my gut and had her checked. When he flashed the letters up on the screen for what I think was 20/40 vision, even with her glasses she could not read them. This made me sad.

He did explain that doctors do not prescribe the full prescription a child needs when they first get glasses. They typically work their way up. So her eyes haven't changed, but he is upping the prescription again. Before it was like 60 percent of what she needs, now it will be more like 90 or 95. That was interesting to me.

Miss N needs therapy for her vision, which will be expensive and cannot be done locally, but what is a parent to do? My kid has to be able to see! I am glad for one thing - she has a lazy eye, but apparently they are steering away from the patches for that problem these days. He said that is like giving an aspirin for a migraine headache. It may help, but it is not enough. So she will not have to wear a patch which I am thankful for.

In two weeks I take M to be checked, because this problem can run in families. I am already dreading this. She is getting calmer every day, but she is not one to sit still in a chair for a long time. Wish me luck!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Story Begins

-
Image
I am participating in a really fun project that is the brainchild of my friend Janna, who regularly blogs at The Adventure of Motherhood . Her project, entitled Mommy's Piggy Tales , encourages moms to blog about their childhood in 15 weeks. Here is the button if you want to learn more or consider joining. My dad, my mom, and me. My daughter, N, has that quilt now. Every year for Christmas my brother and I received our very own holiday ornament. Starting with the “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament, these ornaments usually reflected something we accomplished or did during the soon-to-be-past year. For example, the year I got my driver’s license, my ornament was Daffy Duck in a shiny new car. Every year we enjoyed putting “our” ornaments on the tree. It was a wonderful time to reflect back over our lives and the memories we had made. Sometimes we asked the reason behind the ornament, and learned a little more about our histories. When I married, I got a box with my ornaments in it to ...
Read more

Preschool: Life Changing Years

-
Image
I have been thinking since last week about what to write when it comes to preschool. I am participating in a fun project put on by my friend Janna at Mommy's Piggy Tales. Check it out! There are so many options. I could write about my imaginary friend, Polk-a-Roo, who I was actually a little afraid of. I could write about losing my favorite My-Little-Pony, Firefly, in the sandbox when some mean boys buried it at preschool. I could write about my only child, only grandchild years before my brother came along. I could write about my first “best friend,” the girl across the street (Klaire), who I sobbed over when it was time to move away. I could write about all of those things, but the truth is my preschool years are some of the most important of my life. See, my parents wanted me to be a “good person.” To reach that goal, they started going to church. Not long after they started attending church, something happened that would change the course of my life forever. My parents, throug...
Read more

Christmas Miracle

-
Image
Natalie was hamming it up for Tim the other night. Well, a lot has been going on in the past two months. About a month or so after the miscarriage, I was noticing something wasn't quite as it should be. I took a pregnancy test, and it came back positive. That was strange to me, because we were trying to prevent that as requested by the doctor. They called me in for blood work, and everything was indicating that I was pregnant. I was quite confused, as you can probably imagine. Two weeks ago we went in to have an ultrasound. That was eight weeks after the miscarriage. In that ultrasound they found what appeared to be a baby developing at 5 weeks gestation. We were quite perplexed, of course, because in our minds it should be about 8 weeks. The doctor asked us to come back today because at 7 weeks they should be able to see a heartbeat. The doctor said there was a good chance that there were just leftovers in there because of the earlier miscarriage, but that my numbers (hormone leve...
Read more