The Johnson's Journals: Eye Appointments

Today, both Marleigh and Kade had eye appointments in Wichita. They were both troopers, but Kade was exhausted at the end of his, so he started crying. Big sister didn't like seeing her Bubba crying, so she started crying. :( With both of them crying, I started tearing up. But, we made it!

In basic terms, Marleigh has unequal focus. So, her brain chooses one eye to use primarily. The old adage of "you use it or lose it" holds true. By her brain not using the other eye (in her case the right eye), it becomes weaker. If you would give her a basic normal vision test with both eyes, it would appear she sees fine. And it isn't that her right eye is bad, it is just becoming weak due to the focusing issue. She is young enough that if we can start training her brain to use the right eye, we may be able to correct the problem. It absolutely broke my heart to watch her trying to read the eye chart with her right eye. She struggled. A lot. In order to try to help her, we are giving her a more powerful prescription in her glasses and she will start wearing an eye patch over her good eye for 2 hours every day, so that she HAS to use her right eye. I know this won't be an easy task for her. Right now, she really doesn't like having to use her right eye only. We're trying to play up the aspect that she'll get to be a pirate. I hope that helps! You might say a little prayer for her, that it goes well. We'll try it for the first time tomorrow when we get home.

Kade is showing some signs of the same problem, but not to near the extent of Marleigh. Dr. Whitfill is hoping that his will automatically correct itself, but he will be checked again in one year.

I would never say that Marleigh being born so small was in any way good, but since she was a preemie, we were seeing the opthamologist as a precautionary measure for other issues associated with prematurity. That is how we caught her amblyopia. If it weren't for that, we probably wouldn't have caught her issues until it was too late to correct, so for that, I am very thankful.

After the appointments, we stopped by the NICU. Marleigh got to introduce her little brother to everyone. We got to see quite of few of our favorites including: Dr. Dorn (seriously, my all-time favorite doctor that I or the kids have ever had!), Chris (an awesome Nurse Practitioner/farmer. He's a John Deere guy as well!), Mina, Eva, Stacey, and I'm sure I'm missing a few others. Of course not everyone was working, so we're sorry we missed the rest of you! It was nice for Marleigh to see some of the people that helped her when she was so little and sick. She's been much more interested lately in "when I was a sick, little baby" as she calls it. She was kind of shy, but she did spell her name for them. She has come so far! It really is insane how quickly all those old emotions come back, just being in the NICU.

After the NICU, we met up with Aunt Monica for some dinner. Most places we eat, the kids meals are more than enough for the kids to split. I just ordered one. Both the kiddos were hungry hippos. They ate all of their dinner, and one of Aunt Monica's chicken strips. We then ordered them ice cream since they had done such a good job at their eye appointments. When we got the bill, Marc was really staring at it. We didn't realize, but kids meals were only $.99 on Tuesday nights. Marc laughed at me and joked, "We can only spend a buck on their dinner, but we'll spend $8 on ice cream for them!" I'm sure I'll never live that one down.

After we ate, we went back to Aunt Monica's for a little bit to play and unwind. Monica had a tub of old Halloween costumes, etc., which equals a ton of fun for a one year old and three year old.