Eye Update

I took Weston in to see the retinal specialist (Dr. Tawansy) on Wednesday. He really was fantastic. The news he gave wasn't so good. It's a little more serious even than the pediatric ophthalmologist thought. In addition to the initial diagnosis, he found that the tension created between the front and back of Weston's eye by the blood vessels that shouldn't be there has caused his retina to pull away from the back of his eye. Retinal detachment, if you don't know, is a very bad thing. He doesn't think it's been detached since birth--he guessed that it's probably been a couple of months--but when the retina isn't attached, the brain stops getting signals from that part of the eye. So Weston has a big black spot in the middle of his field of vision in the left eye. Dr. Tawansy wants to operate on Monday but that's all dependent on how much of a pain our insurance company becomes, because he is not a network provider for our insurance. The office staff was going to get back to me today to let me know how that's proceeding. So it could be as early as Monday, but not if the insurance causes lots of trouble.

In the meantime, we have to patch Weston's good eye for about 6 hours every day. As you can imagine, he hates it. He has at least gotten to the point where he doesn't try to tear that patch off anymore, but he's really fussy the whole time it's on and there's not much I can do about it. He does like to get out of the house when it's patched so we've been going on errands and walks and to the park as much as we can. After the surgery we'll be continuing to patch the good eye so that the worse eye can rehabilitate, and Dr. Tawansy estimates that we'll be doing the patching for at least a year after the surgery. Hopefully once the surgery is done and the eye has more potential for vision, he won't hate the patching as much. For the time being it makes him pretty miserable. On the bright side, once we take it off he's really contented and cheerful. Maybe he's learning about "opposition in all things." :)

So, that's where it stands, I'll post again when we know more about the surgery date and details.