[blparent] A Scare and a Question

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Hi, everybody.  We had a big scare yesterday with Sarah.  She was playing and feeling fine about two-thirty in the afternoon, and then all in a matter of thirty seconds, she was crying and saying that her head hurt.  She kept squeezing the back of her head, which I thought was an odd place for a headache.  She'd complained of a headache in that spot a couple of times over the past few weeks, but I hadn't really paid much attention because she'd mention the pain and then be off to something else like nothing was wrong.  I figured she'd maybe hit her head on the table or something, but there was no lump or cut, so I wasn't too concerned.  I even thought maybe she was complaining of headaches because I get migraines myself, and she was imitating what she'd heard me say.  But yesterday, she curled up in the chair and wouldn't move.  I gave her some Tylenol and a bite to eat, but something told me that wasn't enough.  So I called her doctor, who said to bring her in right away.

By the time we saw the doctor, Sarah was having nausea, and vomiting a little.  The doctor checked her over and found that her eyes weren't tracking together.  She could follow a laser light or a finger with one eye, but not with both at the same time if she didn't move her head.  So the doctor sent us to the nearest emergency room at a children's hospital for a CAT scan.  She said sometimes brain tumors could present themselves with symptoms such as intense headaches, vomiting, and eye tracking problems.  You can bet my heart was in my throat.

The results of the CAT scan were normal, thank God.  No tumors.  It still takes my breath away when I think of what we avoided.  I just finished reading three bedtime stories to Sarah, and I felt so lucky to be doing it, knowing there was no growth lurking inside her brain stem.  Her dad said I got worried over nothing, and he was all for waiting till we had something to worry about.  But I've seen the one in a million odds happen--my ex husband was diagnosed with a disease that only about three hundred people in the United States have at any given time.  He was thirty years old when he was diagnosed, and all but a half a dozen of the three hundred people with the disease were at least fifty.  So I know a little about long odds and how they can bite you in the butt.

Anyway, then I wanted to know what could cause such intense headaches and nausea in a three-year-old, if it wasn't a brain tumor.  The doctors think it's because Sarah has strabismus, better known as a lazy eye.  Her left eye doesn't follow the other one very well, which may be causing Sarah to tilt her head for better vision.  The headaches could be coming because her eyes are tired or because the muscles in her neck get overexerted from the tilting.  I have to make an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist this next week, and treat headaches with Motrin as necessary.  All that's better than a brain tumor, for sure.

I had an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist a few months ago, and Sarah's eyes happened to be tracking just fine that day, so the doctor didn't take me very seriously.  I'm hoping the fact that her primary doctor has seen the problem might make it easier to get answers from the ophthalmologist.  I looked on the Internet, and it seems the treatment options for strabismus are patches on the good eye to make the lazy eye do its share of the work, glasses and prism lenses, or surgery to change the length of the eye muscles.  It all depends on what the doctor says, of course, but I'm wondering if any of you have had experience trying to get young children to wear glasses or eye patches, or did you wear them yourself as a child?  I'll need to find a way to get Sarah's cooperation because I won't see if she's wearing the glasses or patches at any given moment, if I'm by myself.

Thanks for sticking with me through this long story.  Mostly I wrote it down because I want everyone to hug their children, and give them a bunch of kisses tonight, and remember how lucky we all are.  Maybe I'm neurotic and a worrier, but I was scared to death, scared like I've never been before in my life, last night, sitting in that little hospital room waiting for the results of the CAT scan, and of course I had to keep most of it to myself because Sarah was going through enough and her dad was like, would you just not worry till there's something to worry about?  I felt like I had plenty to worry about.  Anyway, life is fragile, and every day you have with your kids, every bedtime story, every hug, is a treasure.

Jo Elizabeth

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong.  Because someday in life you will have been all of these."--George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, American scientist