Those Pretty Baby Blues!

As many of you know, Harper was diagnosed with Strambismus, or more specifically, Alternating Estropia  last summer. In plain English, that meant that she was only using one eye at a time. Her vision was good in each eye, but using only one at a time meant she had monocular vision versus bi-nocular vision, which gives us depth perception (among many other things). We found a wonderful doctor at The Callahan Eye Foundation at UAB, and elected to have him perform eye muscle surgery. The percent chance of success for the surgery before the age of 18 months (and Harper's case) is about 70-something %...so we felt it was the best and only chance that Harper's eyes could be realigned and given the chance to work together.  Research says that after 18 months it is really hard for the brain to reprogram itself to use the eyes together.

All that technical jargon aside, we took her in at 6am Friday morning at Children's South. It was the best hospital experience I've ever had. The hospital itself was so colorful and definitely kid-friendly (we pushed her around the halls in a Cozy Coupe!), and the staff could not have been nicer. It took about an hour for the surgery, then Dr. Cogen came in and told us that it went great and explained what he did and what to expect for the next few days. We just needed to watch her closely since the after effects of the anesthesia could cause her to be more unstable. She slept the whole way home (yay!) and was in a great mood when she woke up. She was pretty light sensitive for the first several hours. We had a lunch picnic in her room with the curtains pulled closed :) We could also tell that it hurt when she rubbed her eyes, so we gave her a few doses of the pain medicine the doctor prescribed. Visually, the inner corners of her eyes were red and her eyes were a little puffy and like pink eye when she woke up Saturday and Sunday. Dr. Cogen even called to check up on her Saturday (very nice!). But other than that she has been running around like a normal busy toddler! She doesn't have to wear a patch any more and we don't have to give her drops or anything at all. It's amazing what can be done. I know this really is life changing for her! It's been promising to see her use her eyes together & cut them to one side. I have never seen my sweet baby do that before! I've snapped just a few pictures, trying to get her "new eyes", but it's so hard to get her to look at me these days! I have lots of profile and top-of-the-head pics, and a few straight on shots with strange faces! I will upload a ton of pics soon. I just wanted to capture this experience on the blog so that we can remember and so any family and friends could get a few more details about what all has been going on.

Hope you are all doing well!

I have a couple of pics to add to the post now!