One hectic morning...

We had a late night last night babysitting for my sister-in-law's brother's wedding. Long story, maybe another time. Then this morning we were up bright and early (5:00 am) to get Leah to Bascom Palmer for a 7:00 appointment with a new ophthalmologist. Only when we got there, we found out that she actually had two appointments scheduled - one with Dr. Murray and at 8:45 with the ophthalmologist, Dr. Capo. We met with Dr. Murray first, who told us again that her eyes are stable and look exactly the same as they did in December and before that in August. Then we went to Dr. Capo's office and Leah had her first vision exam since all of this began. When Leah was 2 months old and we were finding out she was visually impaired, we were told that there is so much vision that develops in infancy, that doing an exam at that point really wouldn't be accurate. The doctor used boards that were about 1' x 3' that had a square on one side that had black and white vertical stripes and was solid light gray on the rest of the board. On each board the sqaure and the stripes were a little bit smaller. We were very surprised to see that Leah followed the squares on the first two boards easily. She even attended to the third board, but with the fourth she didn't seem to pay attention at all. Mom and I were both impressed with that. Then, I saw him plot it on a graph of vision development and it was at about the vision of a 1 or 2 month old. They didn't talk to us about it, or show us the graph, so this is my interpretation of what I saw over his shoulder while I was snooping. Then we met with Dr. Capo who told us that Leah does not have much vision at all (which we already knew), and she told us that glasses would definitely not help. She also told us that the suggested diagnosis by Dr. Murray of primary maculopathy, which is just a catch-all phrase that means there is something wrong with the macula, was not the case with Leah. She said if that were true, then Leah would have peripheral vision, only she doesn't, so it couldn't be a maculopathy. She suggested that Leah have an ERG (electroretinography) eye test, that would test the function of Leah's photoreceptors in her retinas. She said that this test would give a good idea of what exactly is going on. We don't have a date scheduled yet for the ERG, but they only do them once a month, and it will have to be in Miami on a Thursday, so it looks like another trip down here. The good news is Leah was scheduled to have another exam under anesthesia in June with Dr. Murray, but now they may be able to combine and do both on the same day, as the ERG requires sedation as well. So, hopefully, she won't have undergo anesthesia twice. This was probably the most informative of all of Leah's appointments to date and answered a lot of questions. However, it was definitely difficult to take it all in. We will update when we have a date for the ERG.