Surgery Today

Today Ashlynn is having surgery on both of her eyes.

After nearly 2 years of treating her vision problems with glasses and patching, and a year after her eyes started crossing, she is having surgery.

In October we took her to her third eye doctor (one optometrist and two pediatric ophthalmologists) who said the eye turning in at age 4 is not normal. He said, “I don’t normally like to talk surgery at a first appointment with patients, but…” He stopped her from patching, which we were happy to give up after a year and a half, changed her prescription, and prescribed a week of eye drops, as a final effort to solve the problem without surgery.

It didn’t work.

So, at Ashlynn’s appointment just before Thanksgiving we talked surgery… and scheduled surgery. Apparently her doctor only is doing surgery one day in December and there was one spot left. (It’s funny how when you hear that you feel “lucky”, like “wow, we just barely got in”).

The surgery sounds pretty “routine”, although the fact that Ashlynn is “old” for the procedure limits its possible success a bit. We know what the procedure involves (cutting the muscles on the nose side of each eye so they can turn back out), what to expect with recovery(day 1- she will want to rub her eyes because they will feel sandy, day 2- soreness when looking to the sides, can go back to school after 2-3 days, overall- bloodshot eyes) and risks (80% chance the eyes will be perfectly lined up… which I knew from other people’s stories, and the usual risks associated with anesthesiology), but those don’t compare with the value of her eyes being straight and giving her the chance to be able to use them both together.

Today is the day.

She couldn’t eat after midnight or drink after 6:30am, so we kept her up and stuffed her face until 10:30 last night. She doesn’t report for surgery until 11:30, so we may end up with a tired and hungry grump this morning, but I guess that’s the price we’ll have to pay.

I’ll just be happy that my girl will have straight eyes.