[blparent] A Scare and a Question

[Peggy]

Oh wow, glad things turned out okay.  Don't listen to anyone who says you're 
a worrier, not even hubby, lol.  I'd rather be safe than sorry!!  My son 
wore glasses at a pretty young age and I bought one of those straps that 
goes around the back of his head to hold them on until he promised me he'd 
keep them on, and that was always my threat, if you don't keep your glasses 
on then I'll get the strap back out, worked pretty good.  Good luck and you 
are so, so right we take so much for granted and we all need to remember how 
lucky we are to have these precious children and that things can change in a 
second!!

-----Original Message----- 
From: Jo Elizabeth Pinto
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2012 10:41 PM
To: NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List
Subject: [blparent] A Scare and a Question

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
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