We had Tate's second eye exam on September 2ND. He did wonderfully as usual. They start out by putting eye drops in his eyes to get them to dilate. They put three in each eye. This is Tate's least favorite part. He hates it! Then they give him what we like to call a cocktail. Tate is hilarious after he drinks this. Brad was asking him how many fingers he was holding up. Tate responded with two. Then he proceeds to repeat the word two very slowly moving his lips all funny. I have to say the hardest part for me, which never gets easy, is when they wheel Tate away to the OR. He seems totally fine with it because of his "cocktail" but it is really hard on me.
Then we wait. Our doctor, Dr. Stout, is awesome! I feel blessed to have such a great doctor and to be so close to him. Some of his patients come from Washington, Northern California, Idaho and further. He deals with all of the Coats Disease and Retinoblastoma patients in these areas.
They checked once again for Retinoblastoma but our doctor is comfortable that Tate only has Coats Disease. Yeah! I was a little shocked that they still were checking because they had not found any tumors before. He said that tumors do not always manifest themselves as solid masses.
Our GOOD NEWS...Tate's eye has responded to the first treatment which means that they have stopped some leakage. There is still more though so they did another laser therapy treatment. Tate will have another eye exam under anesthesia on December 2ND.
If you have looked at the website on Coats Disease, you will notice that there are five stages of Coats Disease. We asked Dr. Stout what stage Tate's eye is in. He explained that it is really hard to say. We do know that Tate has a very advanced case but while some parts of his eye could be in one stage, other parts could be in another stage. He is confident is saying that we are not headed in the direction that Tate would lose his eye. We are very thankful for this. If you want to know more about Tate's journey to this point, you can click on the label entitled "Coats Disease."
3 comments:
Jaime- I had no idea, I lost your blog address for a while so I haven't been keeping close tabs on you. I can feel your pain with the eye treatment to an extent. If you remember we went through a lot of tests with gabe before he even turned 1 for different diseases. The worst thing for me too was watching him get put under for his MRI. Yikes, scarry. Good luck with everything, it sounds like things are good for little Tate though
Congrats on the baby, I am kind of in the dark and far away! What a sweet heart, 3 little boys, you have your hands full and I won't expect to see you blogging very often! Take care. B
Your family, and especially Tate is in our prayers. You're an amazing woman for staying so strong through all of this.
Yikes! That has to be stressful about his eye. Do they think it will progress or is there a chance it will stay the way it is?
Oh, and the cocktail totally sounds like Versed to me! Emma has had it for her bone marrow biospies, and she is hilarious. It causes amnesia and calms the nerves. She gets really soggy, has a hard time holding her head up, but she still wants to try walking (which she obviously can't!). One time she thought the walls were sooooo dirty and wouldn't stop goin on about it. They were clean. Anyway, I won't ramble about it. But it sounds like Tate had the same thing. They can be so funny!
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