As most of you already know, several months back we started noticing that his right eye was turning inward. We started seeing a specialist who prescribed drops to help strengthen the muscles in the eye. That seemed to work for awhile, but then slowly seemed to create the same problem with his left eye. The specialist (Dr Eric Hein out of Wake Forest in Winston....I hope you never need anyone in his specialty, but if you do, I recommend him highly) advised us to stop the drops for a few months to see what happened. Apparently, this is a really common condition in children Nick's age and is generally caused by asymmetrical muscle development in the eyes. The muscles simply don't develop at exactly the same rate, and quite frequently, children just outgrow it.
Our appointment on Friday is for the doctor to determine if he thinks Nick is progressing well enough on his own, or if he wants to pursue other treatment options. One of the treatment options that is a possibility is performing surgery to correct the length of the muscles around both eyes. There are of course, other possibilities for treatment options. Glasses, temporary patching, resuming drops. But all I hear in my head is "surgery", repeating over and over like a resounding gong.
As optimistic as I am, the truth is that I expect the doctor will prescribe some new course of treatment. I do not think he will say Nick is progressing well enough on his own to continue doing nothing. I definitely see an improvement in the frequency of the crossing. But I see it more than I am comfortable with, and I see it intermittently in both eyes. He tends to stumble and/or trip a lot, but who's to say that isn't just due to being a toddler?
There are so many days that I wish the wonderful, amazing Dr. Hein could see what we see and tell me if that's normal toddler stuff or if it's a cause for concern. How am I to know that Nick threw the ball 4 feet to my right because he just doesn't have the fine muscle control yet or because he couldn't see me clearly enough to know where to throw it?
If Nick does have to have surgery, the good news is that it is a really simple surgery, the recovery time is very short, and the success rate for correcting the crossing is very high. But as any of you with children who have had to have surgery know, the anxiety that comes with it is no simple thing. It doesn't matter to me how short, how simple, how easy the surgery may be...that's my perfect beautiful baby boy.
I have no way of knowing if,during our appointment on Friday, Dr Hein will definitively say that Nick does or does not need surgery; he may suggest trying something else before we settle on that final decision. But for now, all I hear is "surgery, surgery, surgery" banging inside my head.
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