Surgery Tomorrow

My husband and daughter are in Detroit today for another surgery on her right eye in the morning.   The plan is—if everything looks good—to remove the PFO and Silicon Oil from her eye and replace it with Healon.   The substances they’ll be removing have been in her eye since December and are non-permeable, meaning they don’t leave the eye and would remain there permanently unless removed.   They were there there to help flatten the retina back down, which they’ve done successfully.    The Healon is a permeable substance and will hopefully over time be replaced by her eye’s own naturally occurring fluid.

That’s the plan, but what does it mean for her vision?   Not too much, really.   We’re not going to have a change in vision after tomorrow’s procedure.  What we’re waiting for is to see if her eye will begin to see.   We were told it took up to four months for rods and cones to regenerate, but that time has passed already by a number of months.   What apparently can take longer is those regenerated cells to begin to fire and make visual signals the brain can see.   At this point it seems as if her eye hasn’t regained much, if any, vision yet.

We were told by her surgeon that we’re still early on in the whole process, so we’re holding on to see if the eye will begin to perceive more.    The next question, which we’re asking tomorrow, is what is the plan for her left eye.   So far, nothing has been done to it.   It has returned to normal pressure from effectively zero pressure, but the folds in her retina remain.   We were told the longer we wait to take action on the left eye, the more likely the damage will be permanent.   However, taking action on her left eye has a chance of disrupting the remaining vision she has, which is why the consensus from her doctors has been to wait and see if we can have some of her vision return to the right eye.

Tomorrow I’ll have more information based on what Dr. Trese sees and on Wednesday my husband will have more time to talk to him and ask questions at her post-op office visit.   So don’t change the channel, folks, I’ll be back shortly with more news from Detroit.

The Big Boy Update:  My son brought his iPad over to me this morning and proudly showed me a picture.   I saw a picture of what looked like a bracelet taken on the carpet but I had no idea what it was until he told me.   He had made a bracelet out of the leg portions of Lego men and then gone and gotten his iPad to take a picture because he wanted to show his friends later.   He was so happy about it he took about thirty pictures.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter can’t see things around her, so she has to go on memory for the most part.   She had something the other day and I asked her where she wanted me to put it (it was a bracelet I think) and she said, “mom, I’ll put it in my secret place.”   I didn’t know she had a secret place so I asked her about it.   She told me it was an unused drawer in her dresser and she hid things there because her brother never looked there and wouldn’t find it.   “Smart thinking”, I told her.