Eye Doctor

Thursday I took my son to the eye doctor. He was diagnosed with amblyopia (sometimes erroneously called "lazy eye") when he was 18 months old. (He is now 8.) Our excellent pediatrician discovered the condition (which has remained undetectable to the casual observer) and sent us to a specialist. In 1999 when he was diagnosed we did not have a pediatric opthomologist in our fair city that our pediatrician respected. So for 6 years we drove the 2.5 hours to Vanderbilt Children's Hospital to see the specialist. He received excellent care there and we only had to make the trip 1 or 2 times per year. Our last trip was in December 2005 and I had a panic attack trying to find parking in the miserable parking garage. (There has been a lot of construction in this area over the years and things changed drastically from one trip to the next.) It is necessary to take the entire day out of school for a trip like that. So I asked our pediatrician if we could find an opthomologist here in Huntsville.

This was our second appt with Dr. Thompson at the Eye Center in Huntsville. (On our first visit in July, even though I had requested in writing (by fax) 10 days in advance for our records to be transferred they had not been sent. The personnel at the Eye Center called Vanderbilt for me and said they would take care of the records. But, at this visit they still had not been sent.) Dr Thompson was very busy and we had to wait while my son's eyes were dilated. So the visit took almost 2 hours. In a moment of desperation J put a post-it note outside the door with a message for anyone passing by to "Please send help!"

So J was not going to get back to school in time for lunch and his eyes were blurry and (he said) stinging from the drops. He wanted to miss the rest of the day. I said, "But J, you do not like to miss school." And my son said, "Your information is outdated."

So we skipped the rest of the day and went home and rested (well, I did anyway.) I had to say no T.V. or Nintendo or Computer because well if your eyes are too blurry to go to school you can't very well play games. So much like a trip to Vandy we took the whole day off. And, little sister didn't even get mad that he missed school and she didn't.