"What pretty eyes you have"

I just realized that I never sent this news. Ella will be having eye surgery this week. The surgery will be Wednesday at noon at the Plano Pediatric Surgery Center. We know that she will be having surgery on the right eye, and possible surgery on the left eye. I have known this was coming, but the closer it gets the more my heart breaks for my happy little girl. I just want her to not have to be poked or prodded...and I was just never prepared for 2 surgeries in less than 1.5 years of life.

Here is the surgery explained (if you want medical info) from our resident eye expert Dr. Andrew Bossen (brother-in-law to Stephanie Poage):
Strabismus surgery generally consists of making small incision through the conjunctiva (whites) of the eye and detaching the eye muscles that move our globe and either shortening or lengthening their plane of action by re-attaching in a different area of shortening the muscle etc. The child is put to sleep, and the surgery generally takes around 30-60minutes (but it can vary based upon complexity). The child then goes home and the eye is irritated and red for 2-3 weeks, and you put in drops or ointment generally 4x a day or so. The biggest factor is managing the child's ambylopia. I.e.- if the child doesn't 'see' well out of that eye and patching/drops etc. isn't faithfully done, then the eye tends to not be as aligned as good as possible. The take home of that is; the brain doesn't like fuzzy signals, one has to force it through patching to look through the non-dominant eye and make the brain use that signal. Then the brain will use both eye signals to further help pull the eyes together to see one image. If one eye doesn't see well, then the brain disregards that image and doesn't really send to signals as strongly to pull/push the eyes to see one signal.

We should be home sometime on Wednesday afternoon and since Ella does so well with anesthesia then I'm hoping for a quicker release from the hospital. She should only be down for a couple of days and then out and about by the weekend. We'll let you know how everything goes.