Little Lost Girl

My daughter’s eyes remain closed today, day four, after her cataract surgery.   She’s told us lots of things, most of them conflicting about what she can or can’t see.  We’re tying to be patient, but it’s getting more difficult to do so, knowing she’s building habits (which she is prone to do) that will be hard to break the longer they go on unchecked.

This morning she wanted to go next door to see if Madison was available.  She got dressed and then went to knock on their door.  After she left I heard from my husband that their family was upstairs watching a movie in their movie room.   I expected to hear my daughter coming back in a few minutes but it was longer and then we heard the doorbell ring instead.  

It turned out she didn’t get an answer and apparently got turned around on the way home, heading instead down the street (it’s a safe cul-de-sac) and was lost.   One of our neighbors brought her home, scared and crying.  

So it was time to talk about opening her eye and figuring out which glasses were the ones that were closest to her prescription.   I’d like to tell you it was an easy day for her and us, but it wasn’t.   We tried to take it in steps but ultimately I had to be more firm with her than I liked, telling her she couldn’t hold her eye open and had to absolutely stop touching her eyes.  

We’ve been holding off on the iPad in the hopes she’d miss it and want to open her eyes to try and see it but that wasn’t working either.   I finally got some traction tonight by making her sit in her usual watching position with the iPad on her knees, close to her face and found out (we think) that the +17 prescription glasses were the closest fit with her saying the +12 and +22 lenses made things more blurry.

Before and after dinner she watched (maybe) Transformers Rescue Bots and I think was looking out of her eye barely squinted open.  I think she can see something, so does my husband, but we’re getting “I can’t see ANYTHING!” to “I see nothing but rainbow” to “I can only see brown” at other times, mostly earlier in the time before the iPad this evening.

Tomorrow she’s said she would like to keep watching the iPad and would be willing to keep her eye open, which I think is a good sign.   Hopefully she is seeing something more than the dire reports we’re getting from her.   It’s still very hard for us to tell as I’m not able to see her track anything with her eye and she’s not overly positive about what she is seeing—a reasonable thing given her vision has been completely disrupted with the surgery.

The Big Boy Update:  My son informed us at dinner, “I think orange should be the last of the rainbow…then purple moves in”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to know what a blood vessel was tonight when I was drying her hair.   I explained how blood brought nutrients to the body and she wanted to know what parts.   When we got to the brain she wanted to know how her brain stayed on top of her body and I knocked on her head and told her her skull protected her brain and her spine kept her body upright along with her skeleton.   She told me she knew what a skeleton was, saying, “a skeleton is a person who’s only made out of bones.”