Clinic Updates from Tuesday

I posted some pictures from this past Tuesday, but I didn't take the time to summarize the appointments:

1) Cochlear Implant Evaluation. We met with the program director, Dr. Norton. Today's appointment was mostly like an orientation--we talked about different types of implants, our expectations, the "positive" and "concerning" predictors for Evan (he only has three positive predictors--the rest of the 10 other predictors are negative or neutral...). Evidently, Evan is a promising enough candidate that we will continue the evaluation. The next step is to get an MRI of Evan's inner ear, and then meet with the psychologist and the surgeon. Jeremy and I still have not decided one way or the other about a CI for Evan--we are still gathering information.

2) Eye Exam. Evan saw Dr. Preston in the afternoon. His vision with both eyes together is very good--20/30. He does still have a significant outward eye turn...the good news is that it is intermittent (comes and goes) and that it switches eyes. When he is concentrating on looking at something up close, he can swing that other eye in. His glasses prescription did not change much--he still has a lot of astigmatism in the left eye. His eyes are also much more aligned with the glasses on--Dr. Preston estimated he is aligned about 60% of the time with the glasses when concentrating on something close. This means Evan is not a canditate for strabismus surgery (to correct the eye turn). Our new plan is for Evan to be patched with his glasses on while playing with visually stimulating toys for one hour per day. We also talked about the possibility of fitting Evan with a contact lens in the left eye. Because of the astigmatism, it would be really difficult to fit him with a soft contact lens. Dr. Preston and I talked briefly about fitting him with a large diameter gas permeable lens--I am going to look into it more.

Between these two appointments, we got to briefly visit our friend in CHARGE Burke and his mom Chris. Burke has a cochlear implant, so it was neat to see one in use (we also got to experience first hand a kiddo who loves to try and eat the CI--Burke can clamp down pretty hard!). Burke used to have a walker like Evan's (he just got a new style a couple weeks ago). When he saw Evan's walker, he had to go try it for the sake of nostalgia. Evan also tried out Burke's, but quickly discovered that walkers can be pretty squirrely when they don't have a lock keeping them from rolling backwards. Thanks for the visit and for feeding us :)