We managed to finally get J to a fantastic ophthalmologist last week. When I say fantastic, I feel the word falls short. The New England Eye and Ear Clinic at Floating Hospital for Children in Boston is stupendous. Their technicians get it. I mentioned he would struggle and the tech that assisted us put things immediately at ease by stating you don’t work with children if you aren’t ready to be patient.
Can we clone her attitude and transplant it to those in need? It was that amazing.
Anyway, between her and the wonderful doctor herself, it was determined that J is definitely farsighted and that might account for the strange crossing of his eyes we see. That’s him straining to focus on that which is close. We all do it to some degree when things are very close to our faces, he just happens to do it to things slightly further afield. It’s been clear since his earliest days that his distance vision was good. This child can spot a favored item what feels like miles away. We’ll be on a highway and he’s noticing school buses on side roads nearby, something we’d miss without his pointing it out. We are now noticing more at home how this likely has been the case all along as we see a few of his behaviors in a whole new light, like how he walks away from a new item to study it before coming close and taking it up.
The hard part of this is whether or not he will need to wear glasses. The likelihood is high that he will need to wear them at some point but since his eyes were dilated at his appointment he was having none of being cooperative with the doctor as she did her measurements. She got some measurements, but not enough that she felt confident in prescribing lenses. He will return in a few months for a follow-up, along with ourselves armed for potential repeat of the dilation issue, and we will see what she says.
It is a relief that there is nothing severe going on with his eyes. It is so hard to tell what is serious and what is not when it comes to health issues and J. He can’t tell me if he’s having headaches from eye strain, and people blow off certain behaviors as just part of his autism and sensory processing disorders. I feel that wrong and unfair. Just because he’s autistic and has SPD doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else possible. It just means sometimes it’s harder to tease out as you’re lacking his ability to describe symptoms to you. We have to go with what we, who are outside his body, see. I am grateful for at least one doctor on his team who takes concerns seriously and doesn’t immediately lump everything up to behavior and autism.
If and when he does get glasses, be prepared for a lot of yelling from himself at the indignity of having to wear the silly things. We’ll see how that turns out.
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As an aside, Brooklyn was with us at the appointment. She laid on the floor through most of it, appearing to do little… It’s worth observing however that we rarely have gotten J into this hospital without a fight at some point. We have now, with her help, gotten him in and out 3 separate times with only mild incidents caused by outside forces rather than a true resistance/fear on J’s part. Amazing!