Eye appointment

Payton had her appointment with the opthamologist this afternoon at the Casey Eye Institute at OHSU. It was a lot of information, so I'm going to try to relay all of it to you, but I'm sorry if I leave something out on accident!

To do the vision check, she had to get eyedrops to dilate her pupils. I was a little nervous how she would react to them (even I don't like eye drops!) but she did fine. Then we had to wait for 30 minutes for the drops to work. She fell asleep while we were waiting, which was great! The doctor could still examine her while she was sleeping, and she was MUCH less fidgety. :) We really liked her doctor, he was very nice and was patient with explaining all of our questions. He said that the retina and optic nerve in both eyes looked healthy (yay!), but that the hemangioma on the left was causing a little astigmatism. With the hemangioma putting pressure on her eye, the concern is that it could cause the eye to fall behind in it's development, so we're returning in a month to check her vision again and to see what effect the medication has had. If the left eye isn't keeping up with the right, he may have her wear an eye patch for a little while each day to make that eye work harder, so it can catch up. He said we can use the eye patch now, but he doesn't think it's necessary at this point, so we're probably going to hold off on making her a little pirate until her next appointment. :) He definitely recommended that we go on the blood pressure medicine as soon as possible, so he was pleased that we're starting it later this week. Hopefully this will solve the problem of the astigmatism, because the hemangioma will shrink.

Her next appointment is on Thursday with her dermatologist at Doernbecher, which is the children's hospital. I guess they used to admit kids to the hospital for a couple days when they gave the propranolol, but they are comfortable enough with it now to only monitor for a few hours. I have mixed feelings about that; I'm really glad that she doesn't have to stay in the hospital, but I also would love to have someone constantly monitoring her heart rate, blood sugar, etc. I'll just be extra worried for a couple days, but I'm sure it will be fine. I will definitely update everyone after her appointment, and let you know how it goes! I plan on taking pictures of her hemangiomas at regular intervals to document them, so that will be interesting too. Her doctor said we may even see a significant difference by this weekend, which would be crazy!

I found a picture online while I was researching propranlol... it's pretty graphic because it's a severe case, so I thought I would post the website instead of posting it on here in case you don't want to see it. The results were pretty amazing though! Here is the link:

http://www.getbetterhealth.com/blood-pressure-medicine-cures-facial-deformity/2009.03.12

Talk to you later this week!