Friday, January 06, 2012

A Month After Surgery

Its been over a month since Joey's surgery.  We've had 3 appointments to make sure that everything was healing properly...and yes, everything is healing properly.  He is down to only the Prednisone drops 2x a day.  He's back to doing all his normal activities, although he has to wear protective glasses when he does sports...which he should've been doing all along anyway.  I remember I had posted a long time ago that we had bought sports glasses to protect his eyes.  Now that he has had so much work done to his eye and it's still in the healing stage, we're more serious about it.  Plus the fact that he has to protect his good eye is very important. 

We took him in for a recheck a week after the surgery, and then another recheck a week after that.  His vision has not been great, it seems he is seeing less than he did before.  The first visit, Joey was really discouraged, and even was crying a bit.   Craig was encouraging him, telling him not to give up hope...that his eye was still healing. Dr. T has said that so far the eye is healing and everything is looking good.  He also said that because of all the Coats activity in his eye, he had done a lot of laser therapy, so there was still a lot of inflammation back there.  So now we just had to wait for the fluid to drain, and also for the inflammation to decrease as his eye heals.  These two things are factors in how much his vision would improve.  Joey always seems to be encouraged after talking with Dr. T. 

It has occurred to me, during this "waiting" period, that the first priority is to control the Coats' Disease...to get that leakage under control and get the fluid in his eye to drain, or get absorbed.   The second priority is to maximize his vision.   I'd been under the impression that any treatment would improve his vision..but the treatment is to stop the Coats.  We've been seeing Dr. T every few months for years.  We'd go in to see him, he'd check Joey's eye, and everything would look good.  That's how I expected things would always be.  So to have the Coats begin to be active again...it makes me angry. 

We've encouraged Joey and been positive with him.  We're praying for him always. I told him just tonight..."you never know what God is going to do, and you never know how He can use the hard things that we go through for something good".

I 'll keep you posted on his progress.  In the meantime, keep my little guy in your prayers.  And us.