Addie's Surgery

Last Wednesday (June 20th) Addie had eye muscle surgery. She has something called congenital esotropia. It is basically that her eyes are crossed all the time (or she would choose one eye to focus with) because her muscles controlling the eyes were too strong pulling them inward. I guess 75% of all babies are born with it a little bit, but most of them grow out of it and their brain fixes it and aligns their eyes. 5% of babies that have it don't grow out of it by 4 months and after that it won't fix itself and they have to do surgery.
So she had the surgery last week and the doctor did a really good job. Dr. Abrams basically cut the muscle off the eye in the corners of both eyes and straighted the eyes and then sewed the muscle on the eye again. It was about a 30 minute surgery, but it was kind of scary because they had to put her under with general anesthetic so I couldn't feed her after midnight before the surgery. The anesthesiologist said that she was really sensitive to medication and when he was waking her up after the surgery she stopped breathing for a little bit so he didn't give her any pain medication like they usually do so after the surgery she was so really upset and really hungry after the surgery. It was kind of traumatic for all of us. She didn't want me to put her down at all the day of the surgery, but she is doing lots better this week. They said her eyes are healing well and they look straighter than they have every been. It is really neat that she is seeing well finally. She used to not be able to see things far away and now she can see me from across the room and I can tell she sees more clearly and spends all her time looking around and observing everything like it is the first time she has seen it. It is also a blessing that I worked for as long as I did because my insurance from work runs out at the end of this month so we were able to have it for the surgery...thank goodness, it was expensive even with insurance.

Here are some pictures of Addie's eyes before her surgery



This is just her being cute


We had to patch her right eye 2 hours a day a week before the surgery because she was starting to prefer using her right eye...she hated patch time!


Here are some pictures of her eyes the day after