A Vision Appointment And An Emergency Surgery

Well, first I have to apologize! I haven't been giving updates this month as much I should have been!

We went to Utah on the 15th for a vision check up and ended up with an emergency surgery.

First the vision results:

Dawson first: We were really worried he couldn't see much, but he is actually doing pretty good. His eyes are formed perfectly and by the looks of things he shouldn't have any vision problems. However, there is a small amount of cloudyness over the optic nerve which makes it a little harder for him to see right now. He sees high contrast, but has a harder time with low contrast things, like faces. There is nothing that can fix that medically. We will just throw a vision therapist into the mix and work hard on stimulating him all that we can. If we work hard, there shouldn't be any problems in the future. It is amazing how much of both of their development rests on how hard we work with them in therapy! Dawson's next follow up will be in one year.

Mallory: From all the pics you can see that Mal likes to cross her eyes quite a bit. We thought this was most likely a lazy eye and we would end up doing patches to help her correct it. It is not. Mallory has cross vision. If you move something in front of her face from right to left she will use her right eye only to see until it gets to mid line then she switches to the left and only uses it to follow it the rest of the way. Somehow she has taught herself to see with only one eye at a time. She will be going into surgery in the next couple of weeks. They will cut the muscles off of her eye's then tighten them and sew them back on. Hopefully, once her eyes are pointing straight, her brain will pick up from there and start using her eyes correctly. We are not looking forward to having her go through this. We can't imagine them ever getting her to hold still enough to get her IV. We are almost certain that even being completely out during surgery she will still have to wiggle :)

After finding all of this out we were getting ready to head home. Dawson hadn't been feeling very well the last two days and we wanted to just get him back home and back on schedule. However, after a few seizures and a whole lot of throwing up we called his doctor and decided it would be best to take him by PCMC to have Dr. Walker give us the go ahead to go home. We didn't want to get home and have to turn around if something was wrong.

Well, something was. His shunt had just stopped working AGAIN! It has been 3 months and usually 3 months marks a safe point and the chances of a shunt failing are way decreased. However, Dawson always tends to defy all the rules of medicine in good and bad ways.

I have to say this before I give any more details. We do not and will not ever question the Lord's hand in all of this! We don't understand why our little boy has to go through so much, why many of us never experience one surgery in our whole lives and Dawson has now survived 27! But we don't have to understand the reasoning other than, it IS the Lord's will. There is something that our sweet little boy will do in this life that he is being prepared for now. He is faithful to the mission the Lord has sent him here for. We are blessed to be the ones he was sent to! His spirit is strong, there is no doubt about that. There has been more than one instance where a doctor has learned Dawsons history and has expressed to us how lucky/blessed we are to have this little boy still. We know!! This is something that is between the Lord and Dawson. We are so blessed to get to be the ones that get to support, love and lift Dawson through this experience. It is amazing to see that when he is in pain, he can manage it if we will just hold him. It is my job to do just that. To hold him, love him, lift him up when it gets to hard, and TRUST the Lord and just leave the rest in His loving hands. He shows us constantly that He is still here and still taking care of us! WHAT A BLESSING THIS ALL HAS BEEN!! The Lord does not send us trials to punish us, He sends them so He can show Himself to us! We through this experience have come to KNOW Him better. We don't have any doubt in our minds that He loves us and that He is aware of us at all times!!

So, back to the update, the blessing was that we were already in Utah and we caught all of this before Dawson had to go through the extreme pain that usually comes with a disfunctional shunt. Not to mention, his Neuro surgeon, the best one there is, Dr. Walker just happened to be in his office and on call. Dawson was in surgery within about an hour of finding out his shunt had problems. Usually we would have had to wait for a day or so.

Dawson did great, as usual, with the surgery. They came to get me to go into the recovery room with him and I ran into his eye doctor that we had seen earlier that day. Which is strange to run into him by the Operating Rooms at 7pm. I told him about our day. He said, "maybe this is a good thing" (it usually always ends up that way) "maybe this shunt surgery will help with his vision, sometimes that happens."

A couple of days later, with his shunt programmed at 200, which seems to be our magic number) Dawson was discharged. Everytime Dawson has a shunt surgery something gets a little better. It was funny to me that Dr. Larsen would say that about his vision, because that had been my feeling when we first found out about the surgery.
Sure enough, Dawson seems to be seeing much better. When I talk to him, he looks at my face now, When I put toys in front of him, he looks at them now, When he hears his daddy's (his favorite person) voice he turns and looks for him and usually finds him and looks right at him. These are things that he wasn't doing before. It gives us so much more hope for his vision. We will keep working with him, but we know he will be just fine. He has been blessed, since the day he was born, that he would be!

Well, that is the long update! I will have to take some pics today and tomorrow and get more up.

Thanks for all of your love and support, and for coming back all of the time to check on us! We love you all!!

AMY