Little Trooper

Natalie had to have surgery on both of her eyes this past Friday. She has a condition called Strabismus where her eyes do not track with each other or as her brain would prefer them to. Consequently, when she's tired and loses a little bit of muscle control, her eyes will shift apart leaving her with a temporary case of double vision and lack of depth perception. It started very suddenly about a year ago and attempts at regular eye exercises to try to get her brain to correct the problem didn't work well due to her somewhat uncooperative age! We knew surgery was probably inevitable anyway and decided to tackle it sooner rather than later after it seemed to get a lot worse during the holidays. At one point in late December, she looked up from her lunch at the Christmas tree nearby and said, "look Mommy, now we have two trees!" I think I was on the phone with the pediatric eye surgeon later that afternoon to get all the particulars about the surgery!

Well, she was a little trooper during the entire experience on Friday. We arrived at Phoenix Children's Hospital at 6:30 am, she was in surgery by 8:00 and we were headed into the recovery room to see her by 9:00. The outer muscle on each eye had to be removed and reattached to her little eyeball. Sounds like so much more than an hour long surgery to me, but that's how quickly it happened. We are so thankful to have found a wonderful pediatric eye surgeon, pediatric anesthesiologist and have access to a children's hospital where everything from the elevator floor in the parking garage to the sticker filled recovery rooms are totally geared toward making kids less afraid of the hospital experience.

Before she was taken into surgery, Corey showed her an obnoxiously heavy bag of jelly beans and promised, if she was a big girl and went with the nurse, she could have the whole bag when she woke up. Well, when Corey and I made it to the recovery room after her surgery she was just calming down from being very upset. The poor recovery nurse was trying everything she could think of to comfort her, but Natalie didn't want juice, stickers, crackers or cuddles! She was quite delirious, but when she saw Corey, she immediately said, "may I have my jelly beans now?". A light went off in the recovery nurse's head and she said, "THAT'S what she was trying to ask me!! Oh, Natalie, I'm so sorry!" Natalie, of course, was in no state to eat one jelly bean, let alone a collection of them, so she clutched the bag in her fist the entire way out of the hospital, while she slept in the car and while she continued to sleep after we arrived home. She held on to them for at least 3 hours until she was finally coherent enough to enjoy them.

clutching her jelly beans as she slept of her anesthesia at home!

Due to her resilient little spirit, fairly high pain tolerance (which she did NOT get from me) and probably in part due to the sugar high from eating only jelly beans after a fast since dinner the previous night, she was acting like her old self by later that afternoon. What a trooper!! We'll find out in about 4 to 6 weeks if the surgery was a success or if we have to do it again. Pray this is it!