Then to Now!

3 years ago...

M had surgery to remove a cataract from her right eye...

She was 9 months old...

After surgery she was about 20/2200...

Which means she could see at 20 feet from her what we would be able to see at 2200 feet...

Now...

She's 20/25!

And still patching, in the hopes of getting to 20/20!

Three Years Ago...

Then....

About 2 weeks after surgery at age 10 months

Now....

3.5 years old at a regular appointment

What I've learned these last 3 years:

Patching a child is difficult.
Just because I don't want to put a patch on her doesn't mean I won't.
She is more resilient than I would have ever guessed or known.
Brown drugstore patches are the worst - decorative patches are the best!
Just because she wears a patch doesn't mean everyone should feel they have a right to comment about it.
Surgery and patching were right for her.  We know she is lucky to have had surgery with no complications, and contact wear and patching with no 'real' complications.  Even still, it doesn't seem easy!
She has had the best care givers who have been able to care for her and her patching/contact needs.
When the surgeon tells parents that surgery is scary and a lot to think about, but it's after surgery that all the work happens - the surgeon is right.
If M could just magically gain vision without patching in her eye that had the cataract and subsequent surgery, I would choose to not patch her.  Patching really sucks.
Patching just becomes a part of everyday life.

The last three years of relentless patching has resulted in a vision outcome for that eye that was way beyond what we had hoped, expected, and dreamed of.  Going into surgery the surgeon had optimistically suggested that the 'best case scenario' for vision for her in that eye would be 20/50.

After surgery she started at a vision of 20/2200.  What 'we' can see at 2200 feet she would be able to see at 20 feet.

Now she's at 20/40, almost 20/30.  What 'we' can see at 30 feet she would be able to see at 20 feet.

She's passed her 'best case scenario' and she is still patching full-time, everyday all day, in hopes of some more vision changes.  Next appointment is in a few weeks!

We are so proud of her and all her hard work!

Matching Patches

M

Practicing

M has been very involved with her contacts and patching lately.  She is very willing to pick out her patch in the mornings (we ordered a large amount of variety with our last order that she helped me pick out online), and is almost always agreeable to getting her patch put on.

She has been wearing monthly disposable contacts for the last several months (more than 6 now I think).  She is always able to have her old contact when we start using a new monthly contact.  She loves getting to play with the old one!  She gets a contact case, keeps it in water, carries it around, takes it in and out of liquid holding it, and just examines it.  The old contact usually only lasts for one day in M's care, but she enjoys getting to handle it the way she wants to.

The other day she was putting her old contact in her doll's eye.  Handling it just the way we do, and trying to insert it into her doll's eye.

Perhaps a few more months of getting older, and more practice on the doll, may result in her being able to put in her own contact!

Taking Out Her Own Contact

M has reached a milestone I thought was unreachable!
I thought this day would never come.
I thought it was ridiculous when I saw other blogs saying that their child could do this at the age of 3.
M is so proud.
She does it every night now.
She reminds me every morning she is going to do it at night time.

Any guesses?!

She can take out her own contact!!

I hold her eyelid, and she puts her finger to her eye, and takes out her own contact.  My 3.5 year old (will be 4 at the end of February) can take out her own contact!

The New Contact

The new contacts M is able to wear now are disposables!  That means no more custom lens for now.  The custom lens she has been wearing for over 2 years were $175 each.  We had lost a few, and eventually they just need to be replaced after a few months of wear (I don't think she had one that was more than 3 months old ever!).  The new disposables are monthly lens and they come in a 6 pack!  Only about $70.00 for a pack of 6!  I tell her 'if your contact falls out or you lose it - it's no big deal!'

The change in prescription has changed M's life.  She is able to see so many more things at greater distances.

This is a picture of how she needed to colour with the custom lens to be able to see what she was colouring.

This is a picture of how she can colour now.  Notice the difference in how close her face needs to be to the paper.  The new lens allows her see from a farther distance, and therefore doesn't need to be so close to focus properly.

So over the past 2 years her brain has been developing because of all the patching she has been doing, her eye has been growing, and those things combined with a prescription change at this time to meet those needs, has made a dramatic difference in her vision.

When she is patched she can navigate herself around town, seeing stores, landmarks, and streets.  She is able to see lower flying airplanes or helicopters and track them in the sky.  She is able to participate more in book reading, showing more interest in the stories and pictures.

We love her new contact because it makes her see better and because they are so relatively cheap!

Contact Prescription Change

M began to react negatively to her custom contact that she was wearing.  Her eye would get all red, puffy, and generally irritated.  It was hard to get the contact into M's eye without her screaming, and it was even harder to keep it in longer than a few hours a day.

Eventually it became obvious that it wasn't just a random or infrequent occurrence, and I made an appointment for her with her optometrist.  She managed to keep the contact in until the appointment time, and showed up ready for an examination with a puffy red and irritated eye.  I was hoping I could get her there, it was at the end of the day, with the contact still in so the irritation could be witnessed by the optometrist.

The optometrist agreed, and called it 'an angry eye'.  Her eye wasn't happy with something, and something needed to be changed so that she could keep wearing her contact and patching.  The optometrist happened to have a few disposables in his office, and gave us two to take home and try.  They were both a change in prescription, size of lens, and type of material.

Even though these contacts were much larger than her previous custom lens, we were able to get them in her eye.  We had tried contacts this size 2 years ago, but they were much too big to fit and get into her eye.  So she has grown, and these larger contacts are now able to fit.

After taking these trial lens home, we realized that these were much better for her at this point.  She was happier, her eye was happier, and she could see so much better!