2nd post-op

We had Daniel's second post-op on Tuesday.  We only had to drive 45 minutes for this one, as Daniel's ophthalmologist is at a clinic in a city not too far from us on Tuesdays.  The doctor's assistant started Daniel out with an eye chart again...and lo and behold, he tested at 20/200 in his left eye!!  That's as good as his right, I think.  Not sure how that happened, but we'll take it!  I am excited now to see how much more his vision will improve once we get his astigmatism corrected!  The part of his low vision attributable to his albinism is, of course, not correctable, but any improvement we can get will help him move through life seeing more, with less eye strain and fewer adaptive devices to manage.  Daniel has been commenting that he can see much more clearly now than before (not surprising, since I think the cataract was obscuring most of his vision in his left eye).

The doctor was very please with how Daniel's eye is healing.  The new lens is still sitting snugly in place, and the tiny hole made during the operation has not opened up at all.  We need to continue being very careful through this weekend, and then we can relax the restrictions a little bit and just make sure that Daniel doesn't get hit in that eye.  We are down to eyedrops three times a day this week (Tuesday to Monday); then we will do two drops a day for the next week and one drop a day for the following week.  I will be very happy when the eyedrops are done.  My morning yesterday did not start out very well, eyedrop-wise.  I didn't want to wake up in the first place, but of course I did because I'm the mom and I have to.  Daniel didn't want to wake up either, and he is not the mom, so it was a pain to get him roused.  I decided to do eyedrops in bed to give him a few more minutes, but he kept trying to turn over and bury his face in his pillow.  Meanwhile Esther had woken up and sat crying in his doorway because I was doing something with him instead of with her.  She had no idea how much I would have rather been picking her "uppy" than wrestling three consecutive kinds of eyedrops into her cranky brother!  I am happy to report that the eyedrops since then have been less dramatic (unless you count him nearly missing the bus this morning because I was late putting them in), but still...that is a routine that I will be glad to leave behind us!

And, now that we are back home, I will post a picture from the big event.  I didn't take very many because...well, we had other things on our minds!  But I did (barely) remember to get a picture of Daniel with his patch before it was taken off at his post-op visit.

And here are a few from the science museum we visited the day after the surgery.  The first picture is Daniel posing next to an imprint of his face (no, he did not imprint the side he had just had operated on!).  You can see the "yes" written above the eye that had surgery--a safeguard, I assume, to make sure all the procedures were done on the correct side!  The second picture is him checking out a laser-string harp, and the third picture is working on a water engineering problem.