Surgery

I wrote the following about 3 weeks ago, but for some reason I never got around to posting it until now.

In a previous post I talked about Rian's eyes needing to be operated on to correct Strabismus.
Last Tuesday we drove up to Kirkland (near Seattle, about a 3 1/2 hour drive) for Rian's eye surgery. He had an appointment with the surgeon on Wednesday to measure the degree that Rian's eyes needed to be corrected. Their measurements matched those from our local doctor, which was important to me just to rule out the possibility that our local doctor was nuts and that Rian's eyes were fine.

As part of the pre-op appointment, they had to give Rian some eye drops to dilate his pupils. They got big. Huge, in fact. They got so big that his pupil nearly covered his entire iris, so we gave him Lacey's sunglasses to wear afterward because otherwise it would have been too bright.

Thursday was a difficult day. Rian had been very good about accepting the idea of a doctor fixing his eyes in the weeks leading up to the surgery, but it all caught up to him at the surgery center when it was time for the nurse to measure his vitals. Suddenly the surgery got very real and he didn't want any part of it.

They got most of the vitals that they needed and it was time for Rian to go back into the sterile room, alone. They brought him a little red wagon, which he thought was very cool, and the nurse asked him if he wanted to go slow or fast. "Fast!" We gave him some kisses, the nurse counted to three, and off they went, running down the hall. Rian looked like he was having fun, but he turned and looked back at us as if questioning whether this wagon ride was worth leaving the safety of Mommy and Daddy. He would tell us later that they had him lie down and breathe like an astronaut, and that he screamed, "I miss my daddy and my mommy!"

We waited in the waiting room for about an hour. A nurse finally came out and led us back to the room where Rian was recovering. I had looked online at some pictures of kids that had already had this surgery beforehand to help prepare myself. I knew it was going to look bad, but nothing prepared me for this.

His back was toward me as I entered the room. Lacey took him, sat him down on her lap, and held him. He turned and looked toward me, staring at me with these huge, bloody eyes. They didn't move at all, just staring . . . lifelessly. At first I wasn't sure if he could even see out of them, but then I figured out that he could, in fact, see. It just looked so . . . creepy. It was hard not to wonder if we had done the right thing.

The next day we took him back to the doctor's office where they ran the same tests on him that they had before the surgery. This time things were much different. For one test, the nurse would ask Rian to focus on something far away as she would cover one eye, then the other. Before, his eyes would jump back and forth as she would switch eyes. But now, both eyes stayed straight, as they were both able to focus on the same point without compensating. For another test, Rian wore 3-D glasses and was asked to indicate which in series of images was popping out off the page. Before the surgery, he could get about half of them right, but this time, he got them all right!

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Nearly 4 weeks have past since his surgery. One eye is looking much better, but the other is still very bloody. The doctor told us that it will clear up in a few more weeks, but that it's nothing to worry about since none of it is new blood.