Tate's Story... PART THREE

Tate was pretty good about taking his drops... most days. They seemed to take the edge off a little, but never really took the pain away. We continued to stay in close contact with our PO, and had to change drops after a while, trying to find something more effective. We also found out that he has calcium deposits forming a bone in the back of his eye, which we were able to see on an ultrasound. That is the cause of at least some of his pain. Tate was still constantly rubbing his left eye (which we are told relieves the pressure and pain), so after a week of being called by his preschool twice (like I had asked them to) because he was complaining of pain, I made yet another appointment with our doctor. 

At this appointment, I asked the big question.... If it is inevitable that he is going to have to have his eye removed at some point, what are we waiting for? After all, it's causing him pain. This may seem like an obvious question to some of you, but let me tell you... as his mom, it was not an easy one to ask. The PO then began to tell us that neither decision (having the enucleation performed or waiting) was a bad decision, but that there could be complications with a prosthesis, and that we might be trading one set of problems for another. He may be allergic to the material that the prosthesis is made of, his eye socket may not take well to having a "foreign object" in there and may become runny or excrete mucous. We realized we had not considered this when we were talking about how it might be easier to have the painful eye removed. So we had something else to work through. Our doctor made it clear that it was our call on whether to have the enucleation done now, or wait until the pain was worse and more constant. Because we really didn't know which way to go, he suggested we make a consult appointment with Dr Y, the surgeon. 

Since we couldn't get an appointment for four weeks, that gave us lots of time to think, talk, and pray (not necessarily in that order). We decided that if he was eventually going to have to have the eye removed, we'd like to do it on "our time". We are going to have to arrange help with the other boys (Todd's mom will be coming down from Ohio to help out), and we'd like to be able to prepare for this huge event, rather than have to do it all in "crisis mode". So we decided that when we meet with Dr Y, we would tell him that we'd like to go ahead with the surgery. 

So yeah, right around then, Tate stopped complaining of pain. You have no idea how much easier it is to say "Just take the eye out" when he's in pain, rather than when he's not. I questioned our decision that we had made. Did we still need to do it? Was this lack of pain a sign of God giving us the miracle we had prayed for four years about? Were we jumping the gun with this surgery, and not giving God time to heal Tate? We knew we couldn't control when Tate would need the surgery if we decided to wait, so we were hesitantly standing by our decision to go ahead with it. We wanted him to be used to his new normal in time for kindergarten in August. I trusted that Tate's lack of pain was from the hundreds of prayers that had gone up on Tate's behalf to relieve him of pain and discomfort. Because I was still hesitant about our decision as the days went by, and Tate was not complaining of pain or rubbing his eye, I prayed to God that we would have some sort of clear sign to point us in the right direction. The next day, I noticed Tate's eye looked worse. A lot worse. The whites were pretty red, the iris was a discolored grayish brown, even more cloudy than usual. It looked like it hurt. But it didn't. Not according to Tate. Of course, this is the kid who has a high pain tolerance, and who had an inkling that we were talking about having his eye removed, so he probably wouldn't admit that it hurt, even if it did. I appreciated God showing me that we had made the right decision without causing my sweet boy any more pain. That was exactly what I needed.