The Rollercoaster

Arwynn was born in October 2004. After finding out she was born with cataracts our whole family was crushed. We didn't know what to do next, but thanks to the eye clinic, a path was already set ahead of our feet. In November Arwynn had her first surgery to remove the cataract from her right eye. In removing a cataract from the eye, the lense inside the eye must be removed and (in adults) be replaced with a man-made intraocular lense. In infants, the lense isn't replaced until after the age of 2. So Arwynn's right lense was being removed. I will never forget the shakes I had from the moment they took her from my arms, to the moment I was allowed into the recovery room after surgery. I can't remember how long she was in surgery, but I can't forget those shakes. Even more than the shakes, I can't forget the smell of the recovery room. It's as if the smell of the anesthesia burned the inside of my nose. It was made permenant, and I can still smell the anesthesia, although I know it's nowhere to be found. I walked into recovery (smelling anesthesia, and then a strong formula smell) to find a nurse I knew quite well holding my baby in a rocking chair, wrapped in blankets, tubes and moniters connected to her all over. She assured me over and over she was ok, and my job, for the moment, was to hold her, comfort her, and try to get a little bit of food into her. She hadn't eaten for so long, for a baby who was suppossed to eat every 2 hours, it had been an eternity. But she didn't want to eat much, so I just rocked her and wouldn't let her out of my sight, or out of my arms. She cried and whimpered and slept. My husband was there the whole time, relaying messages to family members. We stayed the night in the hospital that night, in a little room on the pedeatric floor. The door was made to look like a little navy blue house, and our nurses name was Rocky. It's strange what you remember; if I could paint a picture of it all, it'd take a lifetime.That first surgery was the hardest and most vivid for me, everything was new for me. A new mother, a new baby, and then all this. I didn't even know babies could go through this. And there was much more ahead.


We finally went back to my mother's to heal, being sent home with more eyedrops than I knew existed. (Preforte 6x a day, Tobramycin 4x a day, Cyclogyl 2x a day, Tobradex 1x a night) There may have been more, I honestly can't remember. We did this and patched her eye for 2 wks. That metal eye patch and all the paper tape was so much worse than all the medications. The paper tape ripped her poor face, she looked like she'd been burned all over her face. I hated every second of pulling off the tape. But I knew her sight depended on me.

Still in November, but two weeks after the first, she had her second surgery. Her second surgery was nearly identical to the first. Except this time it was her left eye, and the pedeatric ward had given us a little peach house :)  More needles and paper tape and doctors I'd never seen. But her opthalmologist had found that her eyes looked great behind the cataracts, she had a healthy optic nerve, he was no longer concerned about her pituitary gland. Things were looking up! Then a medical student, training in the hospital, thought he heard something wrong with her heart. He was right.