Preparing for Sam's eye surgery tomorrow

Hello, Lovelies. I’m so pleased you now share my love of Booko! Perfect timing for Christmas, don’t you think? Anyway, back to more pressing matters on Planet Baby. This will be a shorter post tonight as I’m anxious and need to get as much sleep as I can tonight. Tomorrow will be a long and stressful day for us. Mr PB has the day off. Unfortunately, it’s not for pleasure but necessity. We have Sam’s eye operation to fix his squint. He had one in July which corrected most of the problem but now needs another to (hopefully) complete the process. Sigh. Seeing your little baby go under a general anaesthetic before surgery is just ghastly.

My gorgeous, rambunctious*, teething little trooper last week

This will be the seventh time we’ve had a pixie operated on (not including their caesarean births). Yes, the seventh. That’s a lot of surgery in 5 years. Four ENT operations, one dental and now two for the eyes. We hope that our luck will turn with this operation. His eyes are almost tracking together perfectly, but not quite – just enough to be noticeable. However, our surgeon has warned that a third operation may be necessary. Oh, and there is no guarantee that the surgery will fully fix the problem. Great.

Tell me, do any of you know about squints? We didn’t until about a year ago when Sam turned 4 months old. In the Mother Baby Unit, a nurse noticed his eyes had started to wander a bit. The paediatrician agreed and referred us to an ophthalmologist. He told us that babies’ eyes can wander a bit up until they are 4 months old but then settle down as the eye muscles strengthen. If they still wander after 4 months, it is likely that they have developed a squint and will require surgery. That was Sam’s diagnosis.

Talk about complicated!

But what did that mean? I’d seen adults with ‘lazy eyes’ before – you know, people who have a ‘wandery eye’ so you’re never quite sure which eye is looking at you? Well, we were told that surgery at an early age would probably prevent Sam being like that when older. Probably, mind you, not definitely. Oh, and even if the surgery corrects the squint now, there’s no guarantee it won’t reoccur later in life. Maybe in 3 years’ time or even 20. Hmm, that’s a little too imprecise and random for my lawyerly brain, let alone my motherly one. We’re talking about his eyesight here, for goodness’ sake, not just mere cosmetic reasons.

Have any of you been through this ordeal with a little baby? It has been stressful, I must say. First of all, there was the distress of not having Sam able to train both his eyes on me. I was never quite sure where he was looking. I worried about whether his vision was affected and if so, whether he would have to battle with that throughout his life. Then there were all the public comments and strange looks people gave him. I tried to ignore them but that was hard. I also found myself fussing over the angle at which I took photos so that I could minimise the ‘wild-eyed’ look of my darling boy for future posterity.

Then there were the numerous visits to the ophthalmologist and the orthoptist to attempt to measure each eye’s degree of turn. I had lengthy waits with an over-tired baby who had to have eye drops and undergo so much testing, so many flashes of colour and toys in front of him, moving this way and that as they attempted to document how his eyes moved. Fortunately, the squint swapped between both eyes, one more than another. That meant at least that the nerves in both eyes were continuing to develop. If the squint settled in one eye, the risk was that the nerve development in that eye would cease and the brain would effectively switch off transmission to it, rendering him one-eyed. At least we avoided that.

Maybe I should have bought him one of these!

However, it meant that for many months, I had to patch his good eye every day for a couple of hours in an effort to encourage the ‘bad’ eye’s nerve to continue to develop. Easier said than done when your baby wants to rip the patch off at the first opportunity! I learnt the trick of applying the patch just before he went to sleep and was too tired to pull it off. Then when he woke, he wasn’t aware of the patch. The patching helped but it wasn’t enough so he had to have surgery. Mr PB accompanied him into the theatre while he was given anaesthesia. He’s such a great man – I just can’t bear to see the pixies go limp like that. So he’s gone in with them all 6 times. Tomorrow he’ll do it again.

So, PB friends, tonight I’ll try to get some sleep and not worry about how it will go. Or remember how hysterical he was for hours after the surgery. Let alone the fear and worry I have that the problem won’t be able to be fixed. I just have to trust in the skill of his surgeon as he cuts and reattaches muscles to my baby’s eyes. Oh my.

I may be away from Blogland for a couple of days, depending on how the surgery goes. I hope you understand.

* I'm playing along with sweet Felicity's Word of the Week.