Friday, January 8, 2016

Mason's Eyes...

In the last month we have noticed Mason's left eye turning in even with his glasses.  We went today for an early exam with his developmental opthomologist to get things checked out.  It turns out Mom is always right. Yes, the eye is turning in more at all levels (looking far away, medium distance, and close up) and the other eye is beginning to. The issue is muscle control - his is deteriorating.  The glasses he wears can't fix that. Right now we have two options:
  1. Wait 4 months and check again, see if it stabilizes or continues to deteriorate. It is not affecting his vision quality yet, meaning that when he does manage to control the muscles he can see fine. But if it deteriorates more it will begin to affect his vision quality too.
  2. Eye surgery on BOTH eyes. There are 6 muscles controlling your eye and he would have surgery on one muscle for each eye. It is an outpatient procedure and as far as surgeries go is a relatively easy recovery. School age kids typically go back to school the day after surgery. Eye drops for a week during recovery. That's it. It would improve control so that the glasses would work, possibly eliminating the need for bifocals, but probably not, he would still need basic glasses for sure. About 30% of kids go on to need a repeat of the surgery later on years down the road.  The risk from this surgery, which they always have to tell you, is if he gets an infection it could cause permanent blindness.
Our plan is to wait a week or two until we've seen all Mason's other specialists (Myelo clinic is next Friday)and scheduled any surgeries from those doctors.  We expect at least one surgery with the orthopedic surgeon to be planned.  Then we will schedule the double eye surgery around that. 

We are not surprised by this news.  We knew we were running out of options for Mason's eyes.
2015 was a surgery free year for Mason. 2016 ... not so much. If we end up with one with ortho and this one with opthomology he'll be at 16+ surgeries.

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