Less Drops

My husband and daughter did one of those thirteen-hour trips to and back from Detroit today to see Dr. Trese, her retina surgeon, for an in-office check on her eyes.    Dr. Trese can tell a lot in a short office visit with the most amazing thing being how much he can tell from the extremely brief glances he’s able to get into my daughter’s eyes.

My daughter has been afraid of a lot of things when it comes to her eyes, for good reasons on a lot of fronts.   But Dr. Trese she’s never been afraid of.   That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do what he needs her to do to see into her eyes.   She’s been light sensitive and in post-surgical pain.   She’s had to endure thousands of eye drops that sting and to top it off, she can’t really see straight or normally when asked to look in a certain direction.   All of that makes it hard to get a good look into her eyes.

But Dr. Trese does manage to see into her eyes and get the information he needs somehow.   And my daughter thinks he’s great.   Today he thought everything was looking good in both eyes.   Her right eye hasn’t shown significant re-scarring growth since he opened it up internally several months ago.   Her left eye is looking good as well, meaning it’s maintaining pressure and hasn’t had any negative changes.

And that means no more trips to Detroit until winter is over and spring has firmly begun in twelve weeks.    And there’s more good news.   I wish I could say she can see more, but we’re just happy to not lose any more vision most days.   No, this good news is about drops.   He’s wanting to start decreasing the frequency of drops slowly.    And for that, all of us are happy.

She has four rounds of drops daily, with two different solutions totaling twelve stinging drops a day.   We’re going to get down to only eight drops soon.   At one point we were doing twenty-eight total drops per day.   And that was no fun for anyone.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been working on addition and subtraction memorization.   He does not like this work at all.   He says it’s hard, but it’s mostly anxiety because he knows he’s going to be tested at school.   I won’t go into the issues and battles we’ve had over this in recent days.   You would be hard-pressed to believe he actually can do the math pretty quickly in his head (or has memorized the answer) with all the complaining, whining, moaning and despair he brings to the situation.   But I think we have a solution.   Call out the flash cards and let him and his sister answer.   Don’t make it about who gets it first or count who got the most correct or make it about a reward.   Just have them yell out answers.   The casual and yet competitive environment tonight when I tried this and he was firing off answers.   So was his sister for that matter.   Hopefully a bit more of this and he won’t be so anxious about being tested at school.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter said to her brother the other day while they were eating lunch, “I really love your class name.”   His school gives each classroom a name.   She likes his because it’s Emerald.  Maybe this is because emeralds are green and that’s her favorite color?  Or maybe it’s just because she likes the sound of the word.   I should ask her.