If Only One Eye Worked

With everything that’s been going on with my daughter’s eyes, our hopes for their improvement or at least no more worsening, one thing has never occurred to me: what if we had only one eye, but that eye worked?

All along I’ve hoped things would improve and for a long time that hope was quashed with continued worsening in her remaining vision.   Inn December we began to see Dr. Trese in Detroit who took surgical action on her right (worse) eye.   His plan (and hope) was that the right eye could be returned to reasonable working order and then the left eye could be addressed, which was her remaining functional vision.

The right eye has been in limbo and of questionable outcome for months, specifically since December 19th when he did the first major surgery.   The anatomy looks great today, but she still can’t see more than colors using it alone.   Is the brain ignoring the right eye?  Do we have a long path of patching the left eye to find out?  I don’t know.   I hope the right eye is functioning, but we still just don’t know.

The left eye is improving maybe.   It looks slightly better, but not significantly better Dr. Trese says.   She seems (on some days) to see better, but she’s also built lots of skills to compensate for the vision loss in August of last year.    What, if anything, will ultimately be done to the left eye?  Will it get better?   Is it as good as it will ever be at this point?

Then this afternoon as I was thinking about a future where my daughter will have to use a cane (possibly) and learn to read using braille (probably) and never really know what our faces and the world looks like and I thought, “hell, all we need is one eye that works and all that goes away.”

There are people who are blind in one eye that function fine aside from depth perception.   You don’t need a cane to navigate and you can read easily without braille.   You can go on trips to see Mount Everest, Greece and Disney Land and you can see what’s there.  You just need one functioning eye.

I don’t know if we’re going to have one functioning eye, but I would give one of mine to my daughter if it were possible.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I have been working on his immature grasp for writing for four days now.   His grasp is significantly improved, with him naturally holding the pencil correctly with very little reminding.   He is drawing with more control and more ease and I think he’s actually enjoying the times we spend working on things.   It’s a delicate balance in that I don’t want him feeling like it’s work—therefore I bribe him with M&Ms.   I need to keep it fun as well, so we’re not working letters as much as flow and control.   We’ve drawn some fun pictures together.   Today he drew some planets and I made an alien with a green M&M eye—which my son ate.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Our sitter texted me from the pool this afternoon that my daughter told her, “I want to paint the flying car with purple and pink stripes when I’m older.”   She thought for a second and then added, “and make it a unicorn.”