Journey's eye doctor

Today we had our first visit with Journey's eye doctor. The news isn't as great as when we went to the hand surgeon, but the doctor was really nice (although Journey wouldn't share that sentiment). The first thing he did was have her sit on my lap in the exam chair while he looked in her eyes with a light. Then he flipped a switch on his desk and a tv on the other side of the room came on with some annoying sounds and a hopping robot-bunny thing. The idea I believe was for it to catch her attention and he could see how she focused on it. Unfortunately, she didn't. It took a minute of me pointing and Eric standing by the screen calling to her before she even looked at it, and I don't know what his observation was, but he did say at that point that he didn't think she could see well at all in her left eye (this is the one that is underdeveloped, so we expected that). Then I held her while he put drops in her eyes to dilate them, and we were sent back to the waiting room for awhile to let that kick in.

When we went back in, he looked at her eyes again, then held some clear discs in front of each eye while looking through a tool. Then he took a bright light and tried to look into her eyes. Apparently since her eyes were dilated, it was very uncomfortable, and it took the doctor, a nurse, and myself pinning her down, and he still wasn't satisfied with her left eye.

For her right eye, he said she is nearsighted, and will become more nearsighted as she gets older. She'll need glasses, which they usually start at age 2. He wasn't able to get much reaction, if any, from her left eye, so he scheduled a short exploratory procedure where she'll be under anesthesia and he can get a better look. He wants to check her eye pressure and suspects she may have a cataract, but if that is the case, it would have been there too long for him to do anything about it. Or, he could remove it but it wouldn't help her vision, so he doesn't want to do an unnecessary procedure.

So we go to Children's on August 10th for eye surgery. It was funny, when he brought up the subject of anesthesia, he said it very gently and gave me all kinds of facts about how many kids he's done surgery on and he's never had a problem, and the procedure will only take a few minutes, etc, and it's understandable to be worried but she'll be fine. While I was thinking "Cool! A practice run for her next 2 surgeries!"

As you can see, she was less than thrilled about the experience. She has since gotten over it and is back to her normal self though :)