The above post title was a quote from my daughter’s regina surgeon today when he saw her playing cards. He’s seen her vision go up and down and while she won’t ever see normally or even near normally or even good enough for glasses to correct her vision, her vision has improved.
There were complications with my daughter’s surgery today, namely her surgeon getting stuck in the Atlanta airport with a power outage. But he made it in and while there was a delay in her OR time and a more hungry child, the surgery happened.
We weren’t sure for a while this morning if he was going to do surgery or elect not to. Before surgery my daughter had a Visual Evoked Potential test. This involves putting goggle-like things over your eyes and a mesh over her head with some electrodes and then a series of red light dots are flashed in front of your eye. One eye at a time, fifteen minutes per eye.
My daughter counted red light blips up to a hundred for the left eye and then said she was tired of counting now that it was over a hundred. On the right eye she wanted to know if the red light was going off. She saw nothing. She actually scored a zero on the test. But something was registering apparently on the electrodes because the graph showed enough for Dr. Trese to decide to do the procedure. We weren’t sure what she could see, honestly what with scar tissue blocking her entire field of vision and red not being a color she can see well.
When Dr. Trese came out after the surgery he said there was hardly any bleeding. In the prior operations where they’ve opened up this area in her eye there has been bleeding. The bleeding can cause the scaring response to be more severe. So less bleeding is good and almost no bleeding was optimal. He said waiting this long to reopen her eye was probably a good thing because the vessels in the scar tissue had kind of dried up.
The other thing is that both eyes were at seventeen pressure. Maintaining her pressure and knowing if her eyes will ever be able to produce fluid or if we’ll have to add Healon for the remainder of her life to keep her eyes at pressure. So this is good news as her eyes have maintained pressure for six months now.
We don’t know what she can see or if she can see but we’ll find out in the weeks to come. In the past all she’s has was light perception with some color discerning. That means no form vision. What Dr. Trese did say was that with dramatic retinal detachments and damaged rods and cones it can take ridiculously long periods of time for things to heal, sometimes years.
The Big Boy Update: My son got in trouble tonight. I was at a board meeting and when I got home a half-eaten pop tart was on the counter and his soup wasn’t eaten. Skip ahead to the moral of the story here and never, ever leave a half-eaten pop tart as evidence. My son did a lot of creative lying on who and why and what happened but there was no helping it, there was going to be a consequence. I told him he couldn’t put the tooth he lost only hours before under his pillow tonight. This did not go over well, telling me I’d made a good choice in consequences. He threatened and complained and then threatened some more. My favorite one was, “I’ll give you a choice: die or give me my tooth and live on.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: After surgery today my daughter didn’t want to go to her favorite place in Detroit—the mall—to get Chick-Fil-A. This is one of her favorite things to do. Why? Because she didn’t want people to see her with a patch on her eye. This is the first time she’s ever shown any signs of being upset about how she looks or anything else visual. Since they weren’t going to have time to go tomorrow to go though she decided it would be okay.
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