“He opened my eyes with his fingers just like this”

Longest eye appointment ever! 3 hours, for a 5 minute diagnosis. Well if we had to sit through it, so do you!

So the building the eye doctor is questionable looking at best. All of the doctors we have been to so far, have relatively new offices, this office had definitely been around for a while (shouldn’t a top doctor be in a top notch office to feed his ego? Maybe he is just a tightwad. just kidding). Walking into the front lobby there are lots of old people with eye patches. I felt like we had just rolled into some out of the way town that you would find in a Steven King book. Of course there is one little girl in the whole place and she makes a bee-line for the babies. Hands off sweetie! We were sitting for about an hour before someone from the office approached us and said due to the large number of eye surgeries the previous day, all the follow-up appointments will take precedence. (son of a gun, I can’t tell you how naked we felt with the babies in that place with all these sick people. Okay, I don’t know if they were sick, but they looked sick).

So we are about an hour into the appointment with no end in site. People are checking in and being seen before us. We only brought enough food for one feed. Uh oh. Both babies are hungry and there is no warm water to warm up the formula (we have to keep the formula cold when we make it because the thickener doesn’t work well with room temp water). Paige doesn’t care, she says feed me, so she gets kind of cold formula. Sorry princess. Everyone that walks by thinks seeing two babies is a novelty. What, have you never seen babies before? Oh, just never two at once, gotcha. Anyways, some very old lady comes over and starts talking to me while I’m trying to comfort Paige. Not sure what she is saying, but I smile and nod like I’m a Russian tourist fresh off the boat visiting the USA.

About another 1/2 hour goes by and the door to the outside opens up. It’s a woman in a wheelchair. Wait a minute, that’s the mom of the 24 weeker who was across the pod from us at McDowell who was later transfered to Childrens with us. Look one of her older daughters is holding Faith! Wow small world. Tobie asks what she was doing there. The news wasn’t good. Her 24 weeker had just been discharged last week from the hospital and she went to her first eye appointment today (with the same doctor we have). He told them to immediately come to this office and have eye surgery. Wow, how scary is this?

Well a diaper change and two bottles later we were finally brought into a room to get Paige’s eye drops. We have to wait about 1/2 hour for them to take effect before we were finally able to see the doctor. The doctor comes by to where we were sitting in the back of the office. Tobie was holding Cole and Paige was in the stroller. The doctor asks if the little guy is ready. He must have said little guy about 3 times before I said “Actually Paige is a girl”. So when he was examining Paige, she wouldn’t lie still so he had to use the stirrups that hold her eyes open. Have you ever seen any sci-fi movie where they use these metal devices to keep unwilling subjects eyes open? That is what it looked like. In fact she kind of looked like a cupie doll because her eyes were propped open and she couldn’t blink. So sad.

So onto the diagnosis. What did he see? Well she has some retinal traction in both eyes. What does that mean? Not sure yet. He wants to see us in a month to follow up. He really didn’t answer our questions because he just doesn’t know and since Paige can’t tell us herself, we have to wait and see. He doesn’t know how bad it will be. But from the impression we got from him, it’s bad and it’s just a matter of how bad. Will she be able to see? Probably. Will she have decent vision? Probably not. Will she be able to read? Not sure. What about play sports? Doubtful. Will she have another eye surgery? Probably not unless the retina detaches from the traction. Can’t she where corrective lenses? Won’t make a difference in this case. Needless to say, we are going to make another appointment with a different doctor since this Retina doctor told us something different than our opthamologist.

So we are left in limbo land once again (didn’t we leave this no decision land not too long ago?). It’s hard to get excited about the future when you know you have this dark cloud hanging over your head. It just seems we can’t escape the aftermath of the NICU. What’s next, the titanium bands that closed their PDAs fall off? Yeah I’m venting and being silly. There I’m done.

P.S. Uncle Greg (not Gemson), Homer has an appointment tomorrow at the vet to get his nails trimmed. You can get a good nights sleep now.