Baby's Blues

Eyes: so essential, so precious, and so taken for granted.


They are the "windows to your soul," and can express a plethora of emotion and feeling, in addition to the essential function of relating and translating the world in which we move.
Eyes are the instruments of our perception, the gauge for our knowledge and the judge of our insights.

The thought of losing that precious ability is one that is so horrifying to me, as an artist, that my lizard brain doesn't even dare to feature that even in a nightmare. My mind just doesn't go there.

So that's why I'm calling docs and dragging Leo to appointments because there is no way that I will let him lose that gift. I mentioned previously that he was diagnosed with something called Bilateral Six Nerve Palsy. I actually have no idea what this really means, other then what wikipedia tells me.
Unfortunately, rather then the straightforward case of simple cross eyes, which is a pretty easy fix, this is something a little more mysterious. In some cases it resolves on its own, in others, it needs intervention, usually surgical to fix it. To use a fancy term, it's all about abduction baby! The problem is that Leo is having problems with abduction, or the turning OUT of his eyes. When he looks to the side, it almost looks like he is going cross-eyed, but whats really happening is that when he shifts his gaze, only one eye will follow, the one that is turning in. The one that needs to turn out, to keep the eyes in symmetry, is playing hooky and not doing its job. If this goes untreated, it will result in permanent vision loss as his brain will just get tired of that rebelling eye and start to ignore all the information coming from it. Nightmare indeed. However it is one that I just will not allow to happen. Period. Especially since for our Leo man, it's not one eye, but both that are effected.

The good news, and there is good news, is that so far Leo is keeping both his eyes working, and has not lost any vision. Yet. I dragged him back in today because over the past couple weeks we have noticed his eyes drifting a lot more, and he's started tilting his head in different angles to get clearer looks at things. This is something I learned today to define as a "lesser evil." At least he is trying to see better and working his eyes all over the place to do that, which in turn tells the docs that his brain hasn't given up on the data coming in. It's when the eyes stop trying to move around and look, that is indicator for worse trouble brewing.

At any rate, the doctor has recommended surgery to correct this increasing problem, but the issue lies in the second cranial surgery that he is due for. The chances for this surgery to again screw up his eye ailment are, unfortunately, pretty good.  It's also not recommended to redo such surgeries because with each new one the chance of it actually doing anything helpful goes way down.

So what this means is that we need to start pushing to get that second cranial surgery done ASAP so that after, Leo can get his eyes fixed before any permanent vision loss can happen.
Talk about weird incentive to send our son under the knife again. And again.
And it doesn't get easier folks. It's like signing your own death warrant on groundhog day.
But we all have to die someday. And the coward dies a hundred deaths every day for the rest of his life, while the brave man dies only once.

So far, Leo's brushes with death have only resulted in more life. So where's that stinking pen? Sign us up!