Today… the ophthalmologist

Today we learned that Penelope loves the little kitchen and Violet loves playing with her in it. She is content for a short while to play with her sister. Another step in the right direction! Violet still loves wearing matching outfits and if the couple we have are dirty she wants to wear matching colors, it is so endearing, she has been such a wonderful older sister and is so helpful and thoughtful, she is such a blessing!
Looking at the some of the photos we got before we picked up Penelope, we wondered if Penelope had a lazy eye, most times her eyes look just fine but then one would look slightly off. Most Asian children’s noses develop slowly so we kept hearing that it was most likely an optical illusion and once her nose developed it would be fine. We made an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist anyway just to be sure. Today we learned that “lazy eye” can be defined as two things: an eye turn or loss of vision, Penelope has both in her right eye. Her ophthalmologist set up a vigorous plan for the next year, patching her eye daily to start to get her eye muscles equal in strength, then glasses to get the vision equal and if those don’t work we will then discuss surgery. It sounds like the percentages of success from the surgery aren’t so great so even if we get to that point that may not be the right road for us. Looks like we will be seeing him regularly over the next year and we are back in his office again in three weeks. He and his assistant were somewhat positive and said they were impressed that we caught this early, most children come in around 4 or 5, when they start school and have failed a vision test at school, so that’s a positive sign, the earlier it is caught ‘usually’ the easier it is to retrain the brain.
Poor girl, lots of pokes and shots yesterday and eyes dilated today… tomorrow we start the eye patch.