The eyes have it!

Yes, I have lots of other posts I could be putting here and that I frankly feel a little behind on but oh well. This is what I have most pressing on my heart at the moment. The last 3 months have been a bit heavy on eye appointments and eye issues yet to be resolved.

Let's start with our main lady. Aftyn. I started to notice a little eye turn around the age of 18 months when she relaxed her eyes. With a family history of lazy eye in the girls, I talked to our family doctor and got her a referral to get her eyes examined and rule out the possibility of lazy eye. I'm still not entirely sure what that doctor figured out. Basically he advised me to keep having her eyes examined yearly to see if it got worse, became more noticable, etc and so I did just that. In Massachusetts, we had an older gentleman who had had years of experience in his profession as an optometrist who advised us to keep getting her eyes checked every 6 months to make sure her vision wasn't being impaired due to the muscle weakness in her right eye. He actually got Aftyn's right eye to do its weird thing for him every time in the office but never advised glasses or anything and over a year's time put our fears to rest that her vision was staying the same in both eyes. When we moved here I knew it was time to have her eyes checked again. Our lady optometrist checked her eyes in an entirely different way than either of Aftyn's previous doctors, and told me a WHOLE lot more information than either prior doctor. Aftyn's eye was turning out but our doctor decided it was because she was very nearsighted and that glasses should help. Also, Aftyn's right eye was suppressing which basically means it was allowing her left eye to do all the work and wasn't trying to carry its share of the load. The doctor had high hopes that getting Aftyn glasses would help with her eye turn and help her right eye to start working again. So after 6 weeks of glasses, we went back yesterday to have her eyes checked again. The eye turn had come back to a normal range thanks to glasses but her right eye was still suppressing! Aargh. Our choices were to patch her left eye daily or to do eye drops that would cause the left eye to relax to the point of making the right eye work harder to compensate, thus making the right eye get stronger. And the doctor advised that she had found the drops to be more effective than the patch because the patch could be taken off by Aftyn or Bronwyn or anyone really whereas the drops once they're in are good for a whole week. *Sigh* So last night when Aftyn slept, I put her drop in her eye. I think we're going to pray for her eye nightly until her checkup in 8 weeks to see if her eye is turning back on.

Bronwyn just had her eye appointment to rule out eye issues, thanks to Aftyn, last week. Good news: her eyes are fine. Bad news: she has the same astigmatism that Aftyn AND Mirren have. Thanks Reed. He has a gift he just keeps on giving! LOL  Good news: She doesn't need glasses right now but may down the road. She loved getting her eyes checked at the doctor too.

Mirren has an astigmatism but mostly her problem is a drooping eyelid that we have to keep an eye on and we will eventually have fixed surgically. If her eyelid begins to droop over her pupil, which luckily it hasn't shown any movement of any sort yet, then surgery MUST happen to insure her vision isn't impaired in any way.

The best part about all of this is that no matter where we live, we are ensured yearly exams at least on all the girls to check their eyes. While Aftyn gets her eye issues under control we will get to see our doctor a whole lot more often than that. Boy am I grateful for optometrists and most of all I'm grateful that our eye problems aren't worse. I told Reed after Aftyn's appointment last night that maybe it's time to be done having kids if we're going to keep passing on all these eye issues.