ARRRR Matey!

As of yesterday our son has become a 'Half-Day Pirate'. The most amazing thing about it though is that he still looks absolutely gorgeous even when he's in his new pirate dud (can't says 'duds' because he only has to wear one part of the pirate outfit). Have you guessed what is going on yet? Here's another clue:

Yesterday we went to see an opthomologist. Get it yet?

We have started 'Vision Therapy' with Jie-Jie. Although it sounds like we are now forcing him to watch religious programing, that's not in fact what it's all about. The eye without the cyst (the left) now has to be patched for half of his waking hours everyday to make sure that his brain doesn't turn off the slightly blurred vision that is produced by his right eye (cyst eye). We tried a patch out yesterday and he is totally (I'm talking t.o.t.a.l.l.y) into it! Yeah!!! Jean-Pierre laughs at me, but I think they were patching Jie-Jie's eye at the orphanage. Come on: we pull out an eye patch box, the kid takes the eye patch, peels off the back layer to expose the sticky part and then helps me stick it onto his eye (of course I put it on totally upside down - didn't have time to read the directions as the kid was already at work as soon as the patch came out of the box). Anyway, once we got the right size on the right way, he wore it all evening without comment. This morning at breakfast he asked why we weren't putting it on. O.K., he didn't really 'ask' why we weren't putting it on. He pointed to his left eye and went, 'ahh, ahh'. We took that to mean he wanted the patch. We had to apologetically tell him that he'd have to wait until after his nap to get it on. In his usual Jie-Jie style, he was fine with that.

Eva kept asking if Jie-Jie had a 'bo-bo' on his eye. She still doesn't really get it. A little friend was over yesterday and she asked Jean-Pierre the same thing. Jean-Pierre just said, 'Jie-Jie's a pirate' and left it at that.

Jie-Jie was so incredibly co-operative at the doctor appointment yesterday. He sat on Babba's knee (where else) in the big chair and was game to try anything asked of him. He really didn't like it at the very beginning of the appointment when the doc. put drops in his eyes. We figured that after that Jie-Jie wouldn't want to have anything to do with the doctor, but when we told him that there wouldn't be anymore drops ('Jie-Jie, c'est fini, fini' - with wild hand guestures), he got it and let the doctor do his thing.

Diagnosis - can't spell it, but non-cancerous cyst on the cornea makes the cornea irregularily shaped and therefore makes Jie-Jie nearsighted with astigmatism (is that one word or two?) in that eye. The doctor said that Jie-Jie's vision is extremely good for a child with this congenital type growth, but that we would need to do some intervention to keep it that way. Since the brain forms most of it's important connections between birth and 7 years old, the 'danger' is that Jie-Jie's brain will discount input coming into the 'bad' eye and, eventually, 'turn that eye off'. Patching the good eye will force the brain to use the stimuli coming into the other eye to create neuropathways for it. While we assumed that some kind of surgery would definately be in the cards, Dr. Drummond advised against that until Jie-Jie is older. He said that some people opt for surgery after 7 years old for cosmetic reasons, but that surgery does not improve vision. In fact the surgery can make the vision worse because it plays around with the shape of the cornea.

There is a second part to the vision therapy as well. We need to improve the vision in the eye with the cyst. That means.....you guessed it.....glasses. As a former wearer of glasses, I was disappointed for Jie-Jie on this point. I hated wearing glasses even though I was totally blind without them. The challenge for us here will be that Jie-Jie's glasses will not make a huge difference to his vision because his eyes are not too bad. That may make it harder for us to get him to keep them on. If he was 'totally blind' without the glasses, the ability to see would be enough incentive to get him to wear them, but this is not his case. Anyway, we'll see what happens when we get the glasses next week. We chose the trendiest pair we could find that suited his face and were functional. I think he looks adorable in them and he sure enjoyed trying them on.

So, there you go Samuel Jie-Jie. When you're twelve or twenty or fifty and you want to know why you wore an eye patch as a kid or how you ended up with glasses, you can just go back and read this post. Oh, by the way, we love, love, love you.