Pirate Princess

Ahoy, mateys. The one-eyed princess has returned.

Last week we went to visit Whit's favorite Pediatric Opthalmologist. Her vision wasn't great. 20/30 in her good eye, 20/50 in her bad. That's not a huge difference and she's had worse in the past, but it was enough that he wants her to start patching...again. Will this ever end? Will she be wearing a patch to her wedding? Sheesh.

On the plus side, she only has to wear it 2-3 hours a day. So she won't have to wear it to school or church. And we go back in two months. Hoping for a good report then.

Good-bye patching, hello eye drops

We made our bi-monthly pilgrimage to Duke to see Whit's "boyfriend" yesterday. We're doing a "Flat Stanley" project for one of my mom's students, so we did a little photo documentation of our visit.

Here are the kids (with Stanley) outside.

One of the cool things about the Eye Center is they
have a "touchable art gallery" that is completely
child friendly. Depending on how late we're running,
we don't always have time to stop in.
We got lucky this time.

Here the kids are with an art quilt.
All of the artists represented in the gallery
have some sort of visual impairment.
Neat idea.

And outside the gallery, we ran into
the Easter Bunny! (Although
Brandon was sure to inform W that
it wasn't REALLY the Easter Bunny,
just someone in a costume.)

So, we had a lot of fun before the appt, but I'm still not sure what to think about how the appt itself went. I guess all the patching we've been doing was useless because her vision is still unequal between eyes. Boo on that. We've been really diligent lately with those patches, too.

So, now we're on to trying a new treatment. Instead of patching for two hours every day, we need to give W a drop of atropine in her eye every morning. It's dilating solution--I think the same stuff most people get when they go to the eye dr to get their eyes dilated.

I was excited about trying something new and am hopeful that this will help Whit's vision, but I wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be. Sweet little Whitney is and always has been very cooperative with all the treatments she has needed for her eyes, broken bones, etc. She laid right down and helped pull her eyelid so I could put the drop in. But neither of us understood what she was in for. Once that drop takes effect, she can't see. It drives her crazy. She told me four times today, "I'm blind in this eye mom." It was so heartbreaking to hear that.

The written info from Dr. Buckley says that her distance vision isn't affected, but her near vision will be blurred in that strong eye, forcing her to use the weak eye. You should've seen her trying to read books today, which happens to be a favorite activity of hers. She tries to close her dilated (left) eye or will even cover it up with her hand so she can just use her left eye. What a pain! I keep reminding myself that this was the first day of treatment and that she will hopefully adjust to this like she has to everything else she's had to go through in her short life. I hope. I hope. I hope.

We go back in two months, on May 20th. I am already counting down the days.

Dr. Buckley said....

These are two STRONG eyes!

Yippee! We had a great visit to see Whit's boyfriend yesterday. (Even though we were in there for two hours...specialists.) Her vision is wonderful. She is 20/25 in both eyes. That's the best that she has EVER seen in her life. I was so thrilled to hear it.

When she looks far to her left, her right eye still doesn't go all the way, so he said we'll have to see what happens with those muscles over the next several months. Yikes--I took that to mean he is pondering yet another surgery, but I'm not going to stress over that yet.

So, the plan is to cut back on patching. He wants us to patch two hours a day every day instead of all day every other day. I'm still trying to figure out when will be the best time to do that. I don't want her to have to patch at school, so I think we'll try for after her nap. Here's my dilemma: I don't want to spend 5-10 minutes decorating patches that are only going to be worn for 2 hours! Time to simplify. I'm seeing lots of Hello Kitty and Dora patches in her future. I've gotten pretty fast at both of those.

Here are what might be some of the last elaborate patches
...if I can get away with it.

My little pony

Junior Asparagus and Laura Carrot

Bob the Tomato with Junior

We'll try the two-hour patching routine for the next three months and go back to see him in December.

The latest Patch Gallery

I'm taking Whit's vision care into my own hands. We were supposed to have an appt with her boyfriend, Dr. Buckley, tomorrow afternoon. But all they are going to do is test her vision and if it's not equal, they'll tell us to patch for another 4-6 weeks. I know the drill. We've been there and done that. So, I decided to try to test her vision here at home. I couldn't find the little black and white "Allen figures" that they use at Duke in a printable version, but I found another vision test that worked like a charm. Andrew was my assistant last night as I pretended I was a pediatric ophthalmologist and it was very obvious that her right eye is still weaker than her left. At least it was not off the charts like it was when we first started patching. There has definitely been improvement. So, the patching is working, but we're not done yet. So I called and rescheduled for next month. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, last year at about this time, I posted a patch gallery of some of the fun ways I'd decorated Whit's patches. Here is this year's version.

Winnie the Pooh

and Tigger, too!

She wasn't into the Little Einsteins last year,
so these characters were new for me.
This one is Annie.

And this is June.
(When Whit is wearing this patch,
people think it's Betty Boop.)

And then one day Whit asked me to draw "Whitney"
on her patch. Talk about pressure! I tried to
draw her as if she were a Little Einsteins character.
Pretty cute, huh? I like her curly cues.
(Sorry the pic turned out a little blurry.)

Good ol' classic Dora

Here's Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
Princess are hard to draw!

This was supposed to be Boo from Monster's Inc.

And my favorite so far this summer:

Tinkerbell

What do you think? Which is YOUR favorite? Any requests that you think Whit might enjoy? I'm running out of ideas and have at least another month to go. But Miss Whit has been amazingly cooperative with wearing that darn thing every other day. I'm so grateful for that. And it was nice to see (through our amateur testing) that at least it's doing some good.