First, can my daughter see better today than she could last night? Well, that’s an interesting question. This morning I would have told you an unqualified no, but this afternoon I was surprised at what I saw. My retina surgeon neighbor had suggested having her tested at distance with the eye doctor charts (pictures for children) and see what she would test at from six to eight feet away. This morning I grabbed some animal silhouettes off the internet and printed them out full sheet. Before going to school, I asked my daughter if she could tell me what they were. I got through three of them.
She couldn’t tell me from eight feet away all the way down to one foot away that it was a huge giraffe on the page. She didn’t know if the big butterfly was a bird or an airplane, and the only reason she guessed bird was because I asked her, “do you know what animal this is?” When I got to the third sheet she flatly refused to answer and was irascible all the way to the car. And yeah, I was depressed.
I did what any lady would do at that point: I went to get my hair done. Well, I had the appointment and since I now know I have grey hairs, there’s no reason I should tell people about it. You all won’t tell, right? On the way to the appointment I got a text message from my daughter’s doctor. Could I bring her over to Duke early, before the Rheumatology appointment to have her ocular pressure checked by her associate? Why yes, yes I could; I could totally do that. “THANK YOU!” I texted her back.
So with freshly-colored hair, I pick my daughter up and we head to the eye center to meet Dr. Kim. We weren’t supposed to have an appointment. She was just going to sneak my daughter in, do a quick pressure check and we would presumably sneak out the back door or something. I got there though and there was some confusion at the front because they have a system and the system was confusing them what with this whole ad-hoc non-appointment thing. Dr. Kim came around from the back and was talking to them. I came up and said, “is this about a co-pay? If it makes it easier for me to pay a co-pay and this becomes an official appointment, then that’s fine with me.” The co-pay was reasonable and, as I explained it to them, they were helping us so much be working us in that I felt a co-pay was the least I could do.
Then, as the lady beside me complained about extended wait times while I simultaneously read a sign about first visits taking two- to four-hours to complete, Dr. Kim came back and asked for us to come back.
My daughter does this thing now at doctors offices where she acts like a frog and hides under chairs, folding herself into the fetal position. But Dr. Kim was friendly and she got what she needed out of her without any forcing necessary. The first thing to note is that her ocular pressure isn’t high. It’s right there in the happy normal range, even a bit low, which is fine. The second thing is that Dr. Kim thought she saw a little bit of droopiness in the retina of the right eye. That sounds dreadful, but it could be an indication the fluid behind the retina has drained some, which is exactly what we want to know.
About her vision though, while we were in the room and I was explaining how she couldn’t see much at all, we observed her doing things that showed she could see some things. She dropped a piece of granola bar and could find that, but she didn’t see the smaller pieces. Then, I asked her if she could find the whales in the room. And this is where I heard the happiest sound of the day. My daughter looked around in a not-so-well lit room and from about six feet away from one of the walls, gasped. She gasped because she saw the whales. She ran over and looked (with her nose against the wall) to find crabs, fish and even a grouping of three, “Memo’s” (Nemo from Finding Nemo,)
We went to another room that had a magnetic Tic Tac Toe game on the wall. She was able to work the game again and again with the magnet, even organizing the X’s and O’s in a nice pattern along the edge. I don’t know if she could have done that last night.
So are things getting better? I hope they are. It is possible the fluid behind her eyes is also moving around and this morning because she’d been asleep all night, it had moved in such a way that her vision was worsened.
We left the appointment (which was FAR more than a quick pressure check) and headed off to our first Rheumatology appointment, which is the topic of tomorrow’s blog post.
The Big Boy Update: My son is in love. Well, he’s in love again. This time it’s with a friend at school my children have insisted is named, “Cin-ney.” I have tried to explain her name is “Sidney” but they will hear nothing of it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: I picked up my daughter today before she was done eating her lunch at school. She was very happy to have found baby grapes packed for her. The petit Black Corinth grapes are so much fun to eat. She insisted on holding them in her hands like a baby bird until she got into her car seat and could eat them one by one. We packed more for lunch tomorrow.
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