I Spy With My Little Eye

After 3 hours of eye tests and consultations, the conclusion is - drumroll, please - Sada is in fact seeing better out of her right eye than her left eye. (Big thud in the background.) That's me dropping my jaw and thinking, "That's it?" Really, that's it. We found out definitively that the problem is somewhere between her eye and the interpretation in her brain - trauma from surgery, pressure on the optic nerve, pressure to the eye, either before or after surgery, occurring now or then, possibilities are endless and completely open for speculation. Now we have an official baseline "The left eye is not seeing well," so they can document if it improves. Please hold your applause - it gets better!

She had three tests - 1. Watch a checkerboard on a TV screen while electrodes on the ears and back of the head record brain waves as the black and white squares change back and forth for 1 minute. 2. Wear flashy-red-light goggles with the same electrodes for 1 minute. 3. Sit in a dark room with dilated eyes for 30 minutes so the eyes can relax, then insert HUGE contacts with tubes on the front ($1000 each) designed to keep the eyes open for 3-5 minutes. Then watch a red flash, light blue flash, white flash, and one strobe light while the electrodes on the ears and contacts record whether the retina observes the flashes or not. One or two of the tests they did (not sure which ones) were not actually the tests that needed to be done... the opthamologist wasn't too happy and promptly had his secretary call over to make sure we wouldn't be charged for it. We couldn't do the one test we were actually supposed to have run right then because her pupils were still humongous. So we have another 4 hour trip to Salt Lake sometime this month to hopefully learn something we don't already know. :-)

However, there was a bright shining moment in all the fogginess. All the tests were at the Moran Eye Center, which is connected to Primary Children's by the skybridge, and the opthamologist's office is the first door past the stairs (which is the first door entering the hospital from the skybridge), so we didn't have to trek through the whole building that now is bulging at the seams and double-bunked with RSV patients. They can keep their germs there and we'll keep ours here, thanks. The cloudy sky was perfect for Sada's saucer-size eyes on the way home and the flakes falling down were beautiful. With that snowfall out of the way - hop to it, Spring!