She's Getting Glasses!

Chloe had her second surgery follow-up today. She's doing well after surgery. In fact, we've really enjoyed this good week off from patching and the dreaded contact lens. (She's actually been wearing a hard eye guard over her left eye and only seeing through her [good] right eye since surgery.) Dave and I are amazed at how much better she obviously sees when only looking through her right eye. I'm convinced that some of her developmental delay can partially be attributed to her frequent lack of vision. If you think about it, she wears a patch over her good eye for four hours a day. That's four hours a day of significantly impaired vision! The thing to remember is that she will catch up in the other areas but we have a limited window in which to train her brain to use that left eye.

To answer a question from our friend, Jen, Chloe's prescription strength in her left eye was +23 but they're changing it to +18. This is good, I guess. It means (supposedly) her eye is getting better. I take this with a grain of salt and just hope that they doing they best job they possibly can when deciding on her prescription. It's hard for me to believe they can really get the right prescription for an infant by looking into her eyes. Plus, her vision isn't fully correctable. It's not like their assigned correction helps her to see perfectly.

We also talked about the fact that Chloe is near-sighted in her right eye. The doctor put her lens in front of my eye. It's not super bad. Her prescription strength is -2. I'm actually near-sighted with an astigmatism and my eyes both require a correction of -5.5. It's on the strong side and Dave laughs (and I certainly can't blame him :) when I'm feeling around for my glasses and they're right in front of me. The good thing is that it's completely correctable and it makes -2 seem not that bad at all. It does make +18 seem pretty far out there, though! Anyway, we're going to put glasses on her to correct her near-sightedness and give her the best vision possible. Of course, this will only be the case while her good eye is not being patched. Yes, the patching continues with no end in the near future. But it'll be fun to see how she fares with her new glasses. One of her favorite games is pulling mine off my face and waving them around in triumph as I mock-complain that she's so horrible for stealing them from me. (Her squeals are absolutely wonderful during this game!) We'll see how she keeps her own glasses on. The good news is that she's absolutely 100% ADORABLE with her new glasses! I never knew how much I'd love her in them! Really. You'll see. They're ordered and arrive in 3-4 business days.

Seriously, though, the really good news is that she does have such good vision in that right eye. She will read. And for that I'm relieved and thankful. As for playing sports. Well, I'm not so sure about that. The doctor suggested she'd need to wear safety sports goggles for sports since she doesn't have a "back-up eye" in case of injury. We might opt for a more eye-safe hobby like piano or flute... That's yet to be determined...