Anna had her first eye muscle surgery in September of 2013 when she was almost 9 months old. Her eyes looked great after the surgery, but started crossing again after about six months. In July of 2014, she started wearing glasses, and we were also patching one of the lenses every day for 4-5 hours. After doing that for about 9 months, her eyes were not showing any signs of improvement, and we decided to go ahead with another surgery. I didn't feel near as nervous going into it as I did the first time around. It helped knowing what to expect. This surgery was similar to the first one, except this time, they strengthened the outer muscles where last time they weakened the inner ones.
 |
Day before surgery
 |
| All ready to go |
|
Anna was completely calm going into surgery. She is pretty used to doctors and nurses by now so getting her vitals taken and everything didn't even phase her. After they took her back to surgery, we had to wait about an hour before her doctor came and told us everything went well. When they brought Anna back to us about a half hour later, she was still really out of it. She had a rough time waking up. She was crying and thrashing around, trying to get away from whoever was holding her. She still had her I.V. in and she got so tangled up from tossing and turning that it ended up pulling out and getting blood all over me, her, and the floor. That was a little traumatic! After about twenty minutes, Derek finally got her calmed down with a pack of fruit snacks. When he tried to feed her one, she immediately snatched it out of his hand and said, "No! I do it myself!" That's when we knew we had our Anna back. :)
 |
| After surgery |
 |
| I look like I got shot, haha |
So far, the surgery seems successful. For the first month after surgery, she didn't wear her glasses because they were over-correcting her eyes and actually causing them to turn outward slightly. But now she's wearing them again, and her doctor say her eyes are looking really good. But there's just no way to know if they'll stay straight. It's not uncommon for people with strabismus to need multiple eye surgeries. Sometimes a person's eyes will be good for five or ten years and then start crossing again. It's just not a perfect fix because the problem is really with the brain's control of the eye muscles and not the eye muscles themselves.
I've been doing quite a bit of research on strabismus and have read some promising research on vision therapy. We actually met with an optometrist who does vision therapy two years ago before her first surgery. He thought her eyes were so bad that the therapy wouldn't help and surgery was the only way to fix them. But he gave us some eye exercises to do at home and said they would help her eyes stay straight after surgery. We were pretty diligent about it for the first couple months after her surgery, but then we didn't keep up with it because we didn't have vision insurance to cover optometrist appointments, and because her eyes were doing so great that we we just got too relaxed about it...and also because her opthamologist told us that vision therapy doesn't actually work in most cases and basically said it was a waste of our time and money. It's apparently quite a debate in the eye-care world. Most eye surgeons (like Anna's) say the research shows that it's only successful in very limited, specific cases. But the optometrists who use vision therapy report very high success rates for kids like her. I'm not sure what to think. We really love Anna's opthamologist and think he's a great doctor and a skilled surgeon...but we can't help but wonder if she wouldn't have needed a second surgery if we had kept up with the vision therapy. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference. But we figure that even if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot. We're willing to try anything to avoid more surgeries! So we scheduled an appointment for Anna at the end of the month. At least if we try it and it doesn't work, we'll know we explored all the options.
No comments:
Post a Comment