In March of last year, my princess became a pirate for the first time! Check out the story HERE! Well, today, almost 15 months later, we did it again! This time to the other eye! This has been quite the process!
A few months ago, I noticed that her "lazy" eye started drifting again, so I made another eye Dr. appointment to have it checked out...sure enough, it measured bad again! Grrr. So, the Dr suggested follow up appts. every couple of months to see if it was getting worse...it was. So we scheduled surgery again. The deal this time though... he wasn't going to operate on the BAD eye, he was going to work on the good one. WHOA! What??!! Yep, I was baffled. I asked around to others who've been in a similar situation and they reassured me that this was normal, but it seemed strange to me.
Here's the explanation he gave:
When you align the tires on your car, you can't always just align ONE tire. You have to align them both- even if one is not bad, you have to sometimes align both of them to get them track together in the same alignment.
Ok...so that makes some sense. So, he likened it to the eyes. You might have to work on the good eye to get it to track right with the bad eye. So, after asking around, I decided to go with it.
The Dr. said that 90% of the time, after working on BOTH eyes, it's done. He said the other 10% of patients might end up having to come back at some point again in the next few years to have it done again. I'm praying REALLY hard that my Pirate Princess is in that 90% !!
So, this morning, we got to the hospital by 9am for her 10am surgery. I was VERY nervous. Asher had this surgery done in October (click HERE for that story), and he did TERRIBLY with the anesthetics! In fact, he did so badly that the hospital ended up admitting him! So, I was justifiably concerned! Thankfully, the anesthesiologist listened to me and gave Bella extra tummy meds so she didn't throw up one time! WAHOO! Anyways, they gave her the goofy-juice (Versed) to help calm her down, but it had the opposite effect... it riled her up and ticked her off. So when they took her back to surgery, instead of calmly going back with the nurses, she stood on the bed screaming,
"NO, I WANT MY MOMMY!"
Heart-wrenching!!
She did well in surgery. It took a little while to get her oxygen levels up to where they like them to be to discharge, but FINALLY they did. What did it take?? Funny story. The Children's Hospital always gives kids a little stuffed panda bear when they have surgery. I would guess in the midst of all her thrashing about and screaming they forgot.
So the first thing she says after she wakes up was,
"Why those people no give me a bear?"
HAHAHAHA
So I suggested she ask the nurse for a bear. The nurse told her (knowing her oxygen was low) that to get the bear she'd have to cough some and she'd have to jump up on the bed to get it. So we made her, in all of her loopy-ness, stand up and try to jump on the bed to reach up for the bear! AND IT WORKED!!! Her oxygen levels came up and they were able to kick us out of recovery! Yay!
They gave us our check out instructions. We've heard it all before...except one. One very important instruction that I couldn't believe nobody had ever told me before...
"Avoid blunt force to the surgery site for at least 10 days"
Really?? So, I can't punch her eye for the next 10 days, but after that it's okay? LOL... who the heck writes these things??? I'll be sure to keep this in mind.......
She vegged out on the couch all day and night until bedtime! I'm hoping she'll feel better tomorrow. Just before I put her to bed, she said there was two Ashers across the room! LOL... the doctor had said she might see double for a day or two, but she and Asher never did before, so I didn't expect it this time! It was fun testing her.. "how many tvs?" "how many daddies?" etc! Hopefully she can walk without incident tomorrow...it might get a little tricky! This is her picture at bedtime- my poor baby :(
