The Lifes and Times of the Pediatric Ophthamologist

We were in the pediatric ophthamologist's office yesterday. The odd part about this are the random adults that show up for appointments with no children in tow. Are they like Ross on Friends who still goes to his pediatrician?

We were there because of Cooper's blocked tear duct. That was an interesting experience. First off, the doctor put a drop of dye in each eye. In the "normal" eye, you could barely see traces of the dye on his lower lashes, but on the eye with the blocked tear duct, there was dye all under his eye and running down his cheeks, not to mention pooling in the corner of his eye. That's just a visual of the fact that the duct is blocked and nothing is draining the way it's supposed to. (I know when we hear blocked tear duct, it sounds like tears wouldn't come out into the eye, but it actually means the duct that drains tears out of the eye and into the nose is blocked. It's why your nose gets stuffy when you cry, your ducts are draining a lot of excess tears out of your eye and into your nose.)

Once the doctor confirmed that he did have a blocked tear duct, she gave us our options (one was surgery) and we chose to do a tear duct probing procedure in the office. It wasn't pleasant, but it avoided anesthesia for now. I went with Cooper into another room (Keith and Garrett stayed in the exam room). They strapped him on a papoose board, which basically is where they put his arms at his sides and wrapped cloth around them and velcroed it so he couldn't move. There were little cushions on either side of his head to prevent him from turning it. (For all you moms out there, it looked similar to an industrial strength swaddling blanket. But no baby is breaking out of this swaddler.)

He was thrilled with all of this, by the way.

I sat in the corner and tried to see as little as possible, just to avoid another near-fainting situation like when Garrett got stitches. The doctor stuck a dilator into an opening on his lower eyelid, then took a probe/syringe, the probe opened up the duct and then she shot saline solution through the probe and into the duct. It eventually drains into the back of the throat, so once she could hear him gargling on the saline, she knew it had all gone through. Of course he was screaming at the top of his lungs the entire time. The last time I've heard him get that worked up was immediately after he was born. Thankfully the whole thing literally took 2 minutes, maybe even less.

Afterwards we got to see blood coming out of his eye and nose, which is always fun to see on your baby. But now, more than 24 hours after the procedure, everything is looking pretty good. I've seen some tears pooling in his eye occasionally, but not near what they used to. And I've seen no mucous (which was always a problem before the procedure). So I hope it worked. If not, we'll get to try one more probing and if that doesn't work, we have to go the surgical route where they put a stint in his tear duct to keep it open. The probing itself has a 75% success rate. At this point, the only thing working against us is the fact that children are notoriously fast healers and as far as his body is concerned, that blockage was supposed to be there, so it may reform.

A few more new things on Cooper. I promise to post some Garrett stuff tomorrow.

Cooper has learned to say "uh oh" which is so funny. He has it with the emphasis on "oh" instead of "uh". He also has a very deep voice in comparison to Garrett's high-pitched one. We have a video of Garrett saying "uh oh" at about the same age and Garrett's voice is so high compared to Cooper's deep one.

He has also learned to lay his head down when someone says "aww". Sometimes he even says "aww" with us.

Still no teeth, but total grouch-ville lately. I'm going to rename him Oscar if he doesn't get a tooth soon and stop with the crankiness. He had a few days of low grade fever so I really thought a tooth was imminent, but so far it hasn't happened. I can feel where one will eventually pop through, but I've been feeling that for awhile now, so I'm not about to make predictions as to when it will happen.

Well, little Oscar has reared his head, so I'll wrap this up. But I'll balance this out with some of Garrett's hilarity tomorrow. Stay tuned for his knock knock joke about Jesus.