the making of tate's prosthetic eye...

Ready to roll! Conformer is out....

Numbing drops...

You'll see the purpose of that stem sticking out of his eye in the next photo...

This is how he gets the impression... Tate obviously wasn't a huge fan of this, but he did GREAT.

Waiting for it to set.... about 4 minutes.

Mr Boyd was documenting also!

First fitting

The "stem" is still on the prosthetic... making sure his eyes will be looking the same direction.

Initial painting

Checking the base color to see how he's doing

He has this awesome light/magnifying glass so he can see all the colors in Tate's real eye and match them up.

Poked and prodded all day and still my happy boy!

Wow. Cool, huh? The red dot marks the top of his eye.

Trying it on... can't tell what needs to be adjusted until he's wearing it.

Iris needs to be bigger and moved down... also he will trim some of the white off the lower outer lid area.

Taking it out with a special suction cup.

Making adjustments....

Looking good!

Putting it back in. Did I mention how brave my little guy was???

His eyelids were swollen, made worse by his cold. As you saw from the photo in the previous post, it settled down even before we left the office. We will call Mr Boyd in about a month and go in to have any "fine-tuning" done that may need done. His prosthesis will settle more over time, and the swelling made a big difference. It's really amazing to see my boy with 2 eyes!

I am so incredibly proud of Tate. He really amazes me with the strength he continues to have despite everything he's been through. God definitely gives us what we need! 

tate's new eye

This is going to be a short post... I'm exhausted. But this day was phenomenal. Tate got his new eye made today and he loves it! We all do. I'll do a more in-depth, tons-of-photos post in a day or two, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that it went very well! Thank you again for all of your support! 


This is Tate with his ocularist, Michael Boyd! Thank you, Mr Boyd. We are so happy!

puppy dog patches

I think I mentioned a while back that I ordered a cute little puppy dog paw print eye patch for Tate, per his request. Have I mentioned that he's refused to wear it? Yes, in perfect stubborn-4-year-old style, he has refused to put on his hand-picked eye patch. I'm not delusional, I know it's a big change. I have only encouraged him to wear it so far for a few minutes each day so he can get used to it... after all, he'll be wearing it quite a bit here in just a few weeks. We got cloth patches to avoid irritating his skin with the Orthopads or other similar sticky patches. You can tell him all day that he'll be cool like a pirate, but still no dice. 


I blogged yesterday about being concerned about his sensitivity to light. We did start him back on the drops, and put a call in to the doctor's office to see if they have any advice on the issue, or if we can even move Tate's surgery up under "emergency" circumstances. I have a hard time feeling like it's an emergency, because it seems like more than half of his day, he is playing and having fun with his brothers. I do know he's in pain, even through those times, because of the way he's constantly messing with his eye, pushing his fingers into it, and leaning on his palm with it. But until it's affecting daily life, I don't know that it really constitutes an emergency. Not that it matters today... the surgeon is on vacation until next week. Maybe we'll get a call then that they can work him in... I definitely worry about it some days more than others. 


ANYWAY... back to my point. Yeah, I tend to get off track sometimes. Since no one seems to have any good advice on dealing with light sensitivity, I thought this might be a good time to enforce patch-wearing... figuring that if anything helps, that will. So I explained to Tate last night that I expected him to wear his patch for at least 15 minutes today. I told him that I want to help his eye not hurt from the light. He complained complied, of course. I put his patch on him at 11:30 this morning. We watched Jake play Epic Mickey on the Wii. I had to hold Tate's hands for a while, because his instinct is to pull it right off. After a few minutes, he wanted me to let go of his hands, which I did. And he was fine. He didn't mess with it, except to adjust it a little. I bribed rewarded him with brownies, and he got to help me make them. He kept his patch on during this adventure, so in typical photographer-mom fashion, I snapped a couple of quick photos for your enjoyment. 

He really had to summon his Spidey strength to stir that brownie mix!

Please ignore the bed-head. It is still Christmas break, you know. So you want to know how long Tate wore his patch? TWO HOURS! Then he came to me right after he pulled it off and said "Mommy, is my 10 minutes up yet?" I really need to teach that kid how to tell time. Maybe later. :) 

finally!

So Tate was having some swelling and some pain this morning... enough to actually voice it. Although this is always a dead giveaway that he's hurting... 

He presses the palm of his hand into his eye and leans on it that way. That's what helps to relieve the pain for him. This is what I noticed first this morning. So I asked him if he was ok... he said his eye was hurting. Not a good sign. His baseline of pain is quite a bit higher than you or me, so if it hurts enough for him to complain about it, it REALLY hurts. I offered him the bubble-gum flavored chewable Tylenol that he picked out at the store last week. Of course, he refused it. I finally got him to try one (his dosage is 3). He chewed for a few seconds, then made the face of disgust (completely intentional on his part. I really don't think he minds the meds, it's just one of his control issues). It was actually kinda cute. :) It took quite a bit of deal-making to get him to take the other two, but finally, he chewed them up (after I served them to him on a spoon out of his oatmeal bowl, per his request.) I asked him a little while ago if his eye was still hurting or feeling better... he said it was feeling better. I asked him if that meant that the medicine helped, and he said that it did. Yay! Hopefully this is a breakthrough that he will remember. 


Here are a couple more photos from this morning... 




Not feeling too good... :( 

He still managed a smile for me though! I just love his sweet face... 

Thank you for praying for my boy! I hope you all have an amazing Christmas! We'll be spending time with family, enjoying His blessings, and celebrating Jesus! Merry Christmas!

mixed emotions

I feel SO scattered these days. Within a day or two of my last post, our washing machine quit completely. We had to replace it, and went ahead and replaced the dryer, too. Not that we didn't enjoy running our jeans through 3 70-minute cycles to get them dry... we'll miss those days. So yeah, spending several hundred dollars just a couple of weeks before Christmas kinda stunk. But man... I LOVE doing laundry now. You know... when I have time and all.


Tate hasn't been feeling too hot lately. If you spend 5 minutes with him, you can tell he's feeling pretty puny. I have had lots of people asking about him lately, and we certainly appreciate all the prayers. Keep them coming. We have a month until his surgery, and his eye seems to be going downhill fast. I thought I'd add a couple of photos to show you what I'm seeing... keep in mind, although I'm a photographer, it's NOT easy to take a photo of a 4 year old's eye... especially when he pretty much never opens it anymore.


This first one was taken on November 15th...

The next 2 were taken on December 17th... shows the degeneration occurring over the last month...

I can't tell you how much this breaks my heart for my sweet boy. I know he's in pain. He squints all the time, and the light really hurts his eyes, too. He's had several moments in the last week that he's been in tears from the pain, but most of the time, he tells me that he's fine. I can tell that he's not, but I just keep remembering that we don't have much longer, and this trial will be behind us. The doctor has told us that we can give him ibuprofen to take the edge off the pain, but Tate refuses to take any meds. And when a stubborn 4 year old doesn't want to take meds, it's pretty much impossible to make him. We've tried every trick in the book. So please keep praying for him. Please pray that his pain is lessened, so that he is comfortable while we wait for the surgery date to approach. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm READY for this surgery. It has to be better than this.


There is something I've dreaded to add to my To Do list, but it's gotta go on there. I need to call the insurance company to see what we need to expect as far as bills go from his surgery and prosthesis. I like surprises, but not this kind. We have to budget for this, and I have to get an idea of where to start. We took Tate to a world-renowned specialist in Michigan in August, and we're STILL getting bills from that. I think we've hit somewhere just under $2k now (out of pocket), and he was only there a few hours, didn't have surgery, and didn't stay in the hospital. We thought we had seen the last of the bills from that visit a couple of months ago, but had a surprise in the mail today to the tune of $805. Yep, 5 days before Christmas. Awesome. So this time, I'm going to ask them to spell it out for me beforehand. One thing I want to be very clear about.... every penny is more than worth it to make my little guy feel better. I'm not upset about having to pay it. I just want to be prepared. Some of you know that we've been on the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover Plan since February. We've made a TON of progress in the last 10 months... but we're hitting about a $5000 setback from what we expect between these 2 medical bills. Having to replace our washer and dryer just before Christmas didn't help either. It's SO frustrating to bust your butt to get ahead, then hit brick walls. But I know we'll get through it. God will provide, He always does.


It's almost Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of our Savior. We celebrated my oldest son's 10th birthday today. We have so many blessings, so many wonderful friends, so much to be thankful for. I have been really distracted lately, and I have some days that I just want to crawl back into bed and sulk all day. I'm grateful to have friends who pull me out and keep me going. I have SO many emotions, I feel like I'm all over the place. I'm happy, sad, anxious, nervous, worried, excited, overwhelmed... so I apologize if you call/email/facebook and don't hear back from me right away. But don't give up. I still need you. Thank you for being a friend. (insert Golden Girls theme song here).