Ophthalmologist

Back in July, at Jordan's regular yearly checkup, he had iffy results on his eye test. Those tests are not especially reliable with a five-year-old; he doesn't know his letters all that well, the game with which way the "E" is pointing is new to him, and the whole routine with standing on the line, covering one eye with a wand thingy, not peeking, not squashing the covered eye, etc, is a lot of new material to manage all at once. But I was there, and it seemed to me, too, that his right eye was worse. So I agreed with the doctor that Jordan would see a pediatric ophthalmologist for more careful testing.

That was Friday. The office was great - the outpatient clinic of Children's Hospital, in Bellevue. It's a heck of an exam, two hours of testing with all kinds of interesting equipment and procedures (which Jordan found fascinating and participated in energetically). For the distance vision exam, instead of letters on a chart, they have little graphic-logo-looking pictures on a computer screen. And the little pictures told the story: Jordan's right eye is way off, mostly due to astigmatism. We had no idea. When do you make a kid cover one eye? But since he was doing a lot of that during the exam, I just asked him, "Do things look different with this eye than that one?" and he said "Yeah, this one is all blurry, I can't see very well." Doesn't get much more straightforward than that. "But I can see fine with my two eyes together," he added, and I'm sure that's true. His left eye is 20/20.

Which brings up another issue: with his right eye so much weaker than the left, he may not be using the right eye much, and amblyopia is a concern. That's when the weaker eye is disregarded by the brain to such an extent that half the visual system doesn't develop properly, potentially putting one eye offline permanently. In Jordan's case, the eye doctor's corrective lenses brought his vision all the way to 20/40, which is awesome; that means that glasses alone may be enough to bring that eye back into functional connection with the brain. However, we need to keep an eye on it (so to speak). Depending on how things look (ha) after a few months with glasses, he may need to wear an eye patch for a few hours every day. The visual system stabilizes at age 7 or 8.

Meanwhile... glasses! I think he'll be cute in glasses; we'll try and get really good ones, ones that will be really comfortable for him and can't break. But I don't know how to get ones he can't lose, and even if he only gets new glasses every couple of years it's expensive. Sigh.

Educational note: Jordan was absolutely clear that these eye exams were tests, in the sense that you are supposed to get the right answers and it's bad if you don't. How to explain to him that it's really okay not to be able to see the picture, that it's not a bad performance on his part; and yet it's undesirable to have bad vision?