Tomorrow is a big day for my daughter’s vision. We’ve played it off as not a big thing, but it is. Her one functional eye (for all intents and purposes) is her left. The only thing that’s been done to it in the last year is to artificially increase the pressure with Healon to keep it functioning as normally as possible. Tomorrow morning she will have more dramatic surgery.
Her natural lens has developed (or become) a cataract. It’s clouded and is making it harder and harder for her to see. The process of removing her lens is fairly easy. There is an option to add an artificial lens back into the eye, something that happens all the time to anyone you likely know who’s had cataract surgery, only in her case they’re opting not to.
Adding an artificial lens into her eye is a more involved and invasive surgery and has potential side effects that aren’t worth the risk. The solution is to give her glasses that will match whatever refraction index she has for her eye.
But there’s a problem: what’s her refraction (prescription)? We don’t know now and won’t know tomorrow. We won’t know until early June when she has another EUA and her eye has adjusted to the cataract removal surgery. And that means my daughter will wake up with the only vision she had, dramatically—and I mean dramatically—changed.
But we made a plan. We had a discussion with her doctor and went with a plan to have three pair of lenses made, all at very significant prescriptions, so that upon waking up, she can put on each of the three glasses (+12, +17 and +22 prescription) and see which she can see more with. And folks, I can tell you right now I am hoping like hell one of those three is reasonably close.
Today after school I told my daughter her new glasses were in and would she like to try them on? She did and her response was interesting. First of all she loved having three new pair of glasses (in three colors) with color-coordinated plastic cases.
She tried on the +12 (the least severe of the three prescriptions) and said, “woah! Things are in the wrong place!!” She walked around, trying to find the dining room table edge and then the stairs. She thought it was fun. She had just as much fun with the +17 pair. But her favorite was the +22, lenses we had trouble getting made because the prescription is so extreme. She didn’t want to take them off because it modified her world so much. She would come close to me and say, “you’re so giant!” She’d back up a bit, lift up the lens on her left eye and tell me I looked normal and then do it again.
Tomorrow we’ll find out if the glasses help and hope for the best possible outcome from the surgery. As far as my daughter is concerned, it’s not a big thing, she does eye surgery all the time. For the rest of us, we’re holding on tightly to our anxiety until we know.
The Big Boy Update: My son wanted to get a new Lego set today. I told him he had lots of Legos and no, there wasn’t a plan to get him any more any time soon. He wanted to know when his birthday was and then when the next time someone in the family would get a present. We got into Father’s day and Mother’s day and then he said, “why can’t there be a Brother’s day?”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: There was a see saw incident today. My daughter just didn’t see it—at all—in the back yard because it’s green and the grass is green and it wasn’t where it was suppose to be. She ran into the corner of the seat directly on her pelvic bone. She cried for a very long time and is still in pain now. I hope it will feel better tomorrow.
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