Emily's Eyes Update

I don't think I've mentioned anything recently, but you may have noticed in recent pictures that the eye patch is on again. Aside from right after surgery, she never completely stopped wearing it, but we had been down to just an hour or 2. When we went back 6 weeks after she got her glasses, right before Christmastime, she still wasn't using her "bad" eye much. She's old enough to read the picture eye chart, but she just wouldn't with that eye. When the eye doctor put the patch on top of her glasses to block the "good" eye she wouldn't read it, but as soon as he pulled the patch off, she said whatever the picture was very quickly. So, it was pretty obvious to both of us that she wasn't using it, even though she didn't complain about the 2 hours of patching and seemed to be fine. We went to 5-6 hours of patching again, we would patch from first thing in the morning until she went down for her nap, generally 7:30 or 8 until 1 or 1:30 most days. She actually had a tough time the first week of that and got really cranky and tired after 3 hours or so. After a week, she adjusted so I felt confident that her eye was improving.

We went back to the eye doctor again a week and a half ago and he was able to see some positive changes. Emily still isn't great about reading the smallest pictures with either eye, but we were able to get her to do one with the good eye, but none with the weaker eye. It isn't necessarily because she can't, but there are a lot of distractions and interesting things to look at in an eye doctor's office. We are now patching 3-4 hours a day and go back on March 11, I think. It's hard to reason with an almost 3 year old and convince them that they really need to focus on what the picture is. Hopefully at our next appointment she'll be able to really blow us away by what she can see.

I do think that pediatric ophthalmologists need to have a special exam room that is just the stuff they need for the eye chart and nothing else to look at!

Emily's conversation at the eye doctor's was hilarious, though. She is full of questions about everything these days and she asked her questions the whole time. The funniest thing is that the eye doctor has a stuffed yellow duck that wears a red shirt. He sits near the eye chart and the eye doctor can turn him on with a foot pedal near the exam chair and he stomps his feet and a red light goes on. It is to get kids to look and focus on something while the doctor looks at their eyes. One of the pictures on the eye chart is a bird. Emily calls him the duck. The whole time Emily kept asking if the duck on the chart had had a bath because he didn't have any clothes on like the duck with the red shirt. And where his clothes were and how he needed them and on and on. It was pretty funny because this all seemed logical enough to her, but the doctor and I just wanted her to tell us what the pictures were. When the doctor wasn't in the room, Emily asked the nurse where he was, what he was doing and what for. The nurse left the room laughing.