It's time for another one of those, "what can she see?" posts. We don't really know what my daughter can or can't see. At this point, it's almost entirely a question of what she can see, because the question of what she can't see is just too comprehensive to explore. When we discover that she can actually see something now, we get excited, because we've feared that the answer to that question has been, "nothing" for a good while now.
My daughter knows her way around our house and has mapped out her paces so she deftly navigates around in a manner that would lead you to believe she can see a lot more than she really can—until you start really watching her. Then you realize she's running into things all the time, and I do mean all the time, that if she even had minimal vision she could avoid.
It might be a matter of what lighting makes for easier seeing for her though. For a long time, we thought more light might be associated with seeing more, but we're discovering less light is far more beneficial when it comes to what she describes as seeing things.
Tonight, I asked my daughter if she wanted to have the new light do-jobber put in her bedroom as she went to bed. "Do-jobber" is just a word because I don't know what the thing is actually called. It's a laser and LED globe that shines red, green, blue, and white light in a pattern on the ceiling as well as a green laser that spreads a pile of dots on the ceiling along with the LED lights.
There are three levels of brightness. You can have zero, one, or two of the LED colors showing. The laser pattern can fade in and out or can be off. I wasn't sure if she would see any of it. I didn't test her color discerning capabilities because I didn't want to quiz her, knowing the blood that got behind her retina years ago distorted her color perception dramatically. So I told her what I was shining on the ceiling color-wise.
The first thing that surprised me was she thought it was too bright. I had it on the red setting, which is the dimmest of the colors. She could see each color and understood when there were two colors showing. If I'd asked her what two colors, she probably couldn't have told me but perhaps someday if her vision remains stable, she'll know what red looks like to her now and will be able to guess fairly accurately.
What she easily could do was tell me when the pinprick laser dots came on and off. I wasn't expecting her to see those at all. She asked me to turn those off because they were too bright. In the end, she picked red light at its most dim setting and wanted to keep it on for an hour's sleep timer while she fell asleep.
So she can still see something and some things, while not that bright to me, were very bright to her. I don't expect her eyes to heal what with their poor vasculature, but maybe she's seeing a bit more than before. She was wearing sunglasses too, adding to the dimming, and yet she saw it all. She also has no natural lenses in her eyes and had no corrective lenses in her glasses, which made seeing the laser dots also impressive because she has zero ability to focus.
I'm happy about tonight. It's a lot of something that was more than I thought she could see at all.
The Big Boy Update: My son wanted to play music in the front yard while he, his sister, and the neighbors played kickball in the fashion they play at school that meets socially distancing guidelines. He really wanted music to go with their game so I brought a Bluetooth speaker out and his iPad and showed him how to look up songs on Amazon Music. He was so happy about it he brought the speaker in and wanted to have music playing beside him while we ate our dinners. We asked him to not as we wanted to talk together during dinner.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: I dried my daughter's hair for the first time in a long time today. She went to the chiropractor with me this morning on short notice—in her pajamas—as I had let her ride in the car with me to take my son to school and didn't know at the time she wanted to go see the chiropractor as her back had been bothering her. She remained in her pajamas until bath time tonight. Tomorrow she's back to getting dressed before school starts at 9:15
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