Strabismus and my Bug

As a mom, I can say that strabismus can be interesting to handle, especially if you're unfamiliar with what it is and how it affects your child's eyes. With all the information on the internet about it, it can be hard to decipher all that information and translate it into something that's easy to understand when you're trying to explain it to your child. Thankfully we have an amazing ophthalmologist that not only explained it to us, but showed us what he'd be doing and how he would be doing it.

Read the PDF from the NIH here.

My daughter has strabismus and has had 2 surgeries, has been wearing glasses since she was about a year old.  We tried patching one eye, when the glue of the patch caused irritation and made her uncomfortable, which is when we found out that she had an allergy to latex, so I spoke to her ophthalmologist and he switched us to atropine therapy, which is a drop of atropine in the stronger eye to essentially paralyze it to force the weaker eye to function harder. Both patching and the atropine therapy has essentially the same affect, it forces the weaker eye to take control and work harder then the stronger eye in the hopes of correcting the alignment of the eyes, in conjunction with glasses.  This doesn't always work, as in our case, Bug needed surgery twice.

We sat there with the ophthalmologist, as soon as he mentioned the word surgery my stomach twisted up tighter then anything I'd ever felt before. The days went by as we prepared for it, then the day of her first surgery came and we were okay, I was okay...and then she came out of the anesthesia...that's when it hit me that my baby wasn't going to leave me, that I wouldn't lose my baby Bug...I threw up and felt better, and she was perfect as always.  That was surgery number one...surgery number two Strider wasn't here for.

When Bug came out of the anesthesia the first time she started screaming instantly, which made my heart sink and my stomach wrench. I was worried about my Bug, worried that she was in pain, my stomach of course had a different concern...I barely made it to the bathroom in time, I was so worried that I actually threw up. It wasn't about me, no matter how I felt, I knew that it was all about my baby Bug, and that's what I focused on.  We asked the surgeon, which was her ophthalmologist, what we needed to do as far as treatment, medications, restrictions. He let us know that we had to watch her, keep an eye out for any signs of infections, if she fell or banged her head that we were to bring her into his clinic immediately.

Of course, a week after her surgery she took a header on the sidewalk, forehead first right on the sidewalk at our back door. Gathering her up, called the EMT's then called the clinic, getting her in there right away the ophthalmologist was able to look at her eyes and the muscles, thankfully there was no damage to the muscles or the eyes, the last thing she needed at that point was another, more extensive, surgery. We did however have to watch her for signs of a concussion because her forehead welted instead of bled. Suffice it to say that Bug was less then thrilled about being woken up every two hours.

After that everything looked to be pretty good, until her right eye started to drift again.  We watched the eye, did more atropine therapy, more small detail work to try to focus her eyes in one place, and another script for glasses.  Sadly nothing helped, so she had another surgery this past July. That was a whole different adventure which you can read about here.


< /RANT >