Post Op - Day 1

Ethen had his eye correction surgery yesterday. It was quite an adventure for him. We haven't debriefed too much with him, but it will be fun to hear his perspective.



Basically, the procedure was to shorten 2 of his muscles in his right eye to keep it from "being lazy" and wandering too far. When he gets fatigued, it would wander. After trying to patch it for 3 months, there was no lasting progress. The test prior and following the patching was exactly the same. So, we decided to fix it a different way.


I described the procedure in an earlier post, but to briefly describe it again, here goes. The surgeon didn't have to make any outer incision, just a turn of the eye, a snip of the muscles and a patch to cover it for a while and he's good to go.



So, yesterday morning was the procedure. We went to Emanuel over in Portland and had a great experience. He was given a sedative that was pretty fast acting. He kinda pretty droopy pretty quickly, only 15 minutes or so. Ethen got changed into his "hospital jammies", went to the pre-op room and was ready to go when Ethen said, "Dadda, there's something inside me." What was so funny about it was that his eyes were half mass and his speech was quite slurred. He was pretty out of it, but he was quite obstinate. He didn't have the strength, but he had quite the will. The anaesthesiologist whisked him away in his arms and Ethen didn't fuss. I was quite glad. That is hard for us to let him go like that. Almost 2 hours later, the surgeon came out and said everything went really well. Ethen woke up soon thereafter asking for Daddy (b/c Daddy was holding him just prior to leaving for the operation) and Mommy was just chopped liver...until I held him in the post-op room. He had an eye patch on, his hand had an IV, his leg had a blood pressure cuff, he wouldn't open his eyes, and the nurses were not who he was expecting to wake up to. Here's a pic of him in that moment. He stayed in my arms like this for about 2 hours. (Isn't my tummy big?!)






He recovered very well and the next step was to successfully get down a popcicle and then he could go home. By 1:30 we were on our way home and ready to recover in our own environment.



Once we got home, Ethen was pretty much normal and ready to play. We took a pic of him with his eye patch at home, just prior to taking the patch off (in hopes that he's start using his "new" eye...no luck).



It is the day after and Ethen still hasn't opened his eye, except for the 2 times for us to put his medicine in it. It is pretty blood-shot and just slightly swollen. No biggie though. At some point today, we'll put an ice-pack on it, but other than that, eye goop 3 times a day and he's good to go.