Thursday, March 9, 2017

Jesse visits Dr. Granet for a checkup

In mid-January we made another trip down to San Diego to see Dr. Granet.  This was our 2nd visit with Dr. Granet and we were hopeful that we would be in a position where we were comfortable making a call on surgery.

Unfortunately that didn't really happen.

In October 2016 we started noticing Jesse develop a second null point.  Instead of chin down in a single plane, he's now doing a combination yaw/pitch/roll where his chin tilts to the right and the corner of his left eye tilts toward the floor.  He doesn't use it often, but if he really wants to see something, that is the point of his best vision.  (It's interesting to note this is usually when he's trying to pick the pasta or black beans off his plate while avoiding some other food that he doesn't like)

Given that it was only about 2 months since Jesse had developed this new null point, we all decided it would be a good idea to hold off a few more months to see what happens.  It's much easier to perform surgery on known null point(s) and allow the children to figure out their best vision before correcting to it.  Jesse isn't even 2 years old yet, and in the grand scheme of things 4 more months won't really make much of a difference.

Of course, over the last 6 weeks, we've really been noticing his two null points, as described above, so in a way I'm glad we waited.  I feel much more confident now knowing what we would like to do and I feel ready.  I'm eager for Jesse to have the surgery and I just really hope and pray that it improves his vision, especially for distance where he seems to have the most trouble.

Also on our trip I learned an interesting fact about the surgical differences between Dr. Granet's and Dr. Hertle's procedures.  Ever since July 2016 it had bothered me that Dr. Hertle would admit to a 10% or more probability that an adverse event of his surgery would be strabismus (lazy eye), yet Dr. Granet claimed to only have had this ever happen to one or two patients.  As it turns out, Dr. Granet will not touch the side muscles during the first surgery.  He would rather wait to see if the null point isn't fully corrected, then go in and do a slight correction surgery.  Where Dr. Hertle wants to tackle all muscles at once to attempt to give the best outcome on the first surgery.  Knowing this, I'm even more happy with our decision to wait for Dr. Granet and to trust him to perform the surgery on little Jesse.

Jesse did great with the doctors and even sat 
in "his chair" all by himself for the whole exam!

Also, as a side note, Jesse totally rocks the game Perfection.  So we know his close up vision is good!

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