Monday, March 14, 2011

Vision Update

Sadie saw the eye doctor today. He was impressed with how much her vision has improved and that she was able to be there without being so sad (last time turned into a screamy meltdown). Sadie's vision was actually assessed this time!

It was determined that 1. Sadie needs to continue to become more consistent with her vision, and 2. we need to work on aligning her eyes so that they are able to work together more. As of right now her left eye is weaker and tends to drift outside a lot.

There was mention of surgery in the future. This surgery would adjust the muscles in her eyes, the ones that keep your eyes aligned and allow you to track an object, that way she wouldn't need to work so hard to use her vision because the eyes would be straightened for her. Right now she is spending a lot of energy pulling her eyes together, which means she has less energy to spend actually using her vision.

However, this surgery would not be beneficial until she uses her vision on a more consistent basis and is able to track better. So for now we will work on strengthening that left eye as much as we can. We are going to start patching Sadie's right eye (so her left has to work independently) for about a half hour each day. We will do this for 2 days in a row, then we will patch her left eye for one day. The reason we still patch the left one day is that we don't want to stunt her brain development by only allowing one eye to get stronger.

We will do this for 3 months or so and then we'll go back and check her again. Hopefully we will see Michelle for a movement lesson between now and then and that will greatly improve her vision as well. Either way, I hope we will continue to see improvement.

And I will definitely post some pictures of our patching experience!

No comments:

Post a Comment