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Wednesday Update: 01/16/08

Well, we survived our trip to Iowa City. Matt’s surgery went well, though it was a long and tiring couple of days. We had appointments on Monday to get all our ducks in a row for the surgery, including meeting with the surgeon for one last set of measurements and discussions. Dr. Olson is really a great doctor who truly takes his time and explains things to his patients. I can tell he really wants the best possible outcome…for Matt, not for himself. He explained that because Matt can’t really look up very far, they are trying to correct his vision while he’s looking straight ahead and down a little. When Matt looks through the top of his glasses the two images are lined up next to each other, with one a little higher than the other. But as he brings his chin up and looks through the bottom of his glasses, the images come together and overlap, but one of them twists off at a different angle. This twisting/tilting/torsion, is what we were attempting to fix with this surgery. Before surgery they put several drops in his eyes to dilate his pupils. Apparently with his pupils dilated they are able to see back in his eyes to better try and pinpoint which area is causing the tilting of the image. All this time Matt perceived the tilting to be coming from the right eye, but it was actually his left which caused the problem. So, they only ended up operating on the left eye. After the surgery, which lasted nearly 3 hours, the surgeon felt good that he was able to fix the tilting. However, there is the possibility that the images might still be off horizontally or vertically, since they were operating on muscles which had scar tissue from previous surgeries. He did say though, that if we did fix the tilting, that there would be better chances that he might be able to alleviate the double vision through prism in his lenses, or another surgery…which would be much easier than the one he had yesterday.

We were both so tired yesterday…had to be at the hospital at 7:30…surgery started around 10:00…got over a little before 1:00…I got to see him around 2:20…we left the hospital around 4:00…got home around 6:00. It was a LONG day. We got home, ordered a pizza, and were in bed by 8:30!!!

This morning we took the patch off to see how his eye looked, and it was pretty swollen and sore. Matt said he feels like he was punched and that this might be the roughest he’s felt after these surgeries. I’m working from home the rest of the week, so he can take it easy and rest up. He did say that right now he still sees two, but it’s closer than ever before, and the tilting does seem to be gone! Hopefully as things heal, it will be even better…and after his time in China, who knows how things will improve!!

Speaking of China…we did officially order our plane tickets!! We are really getting excited about it!! Also, things are moving along with the new house. Sunday, we had an open house here so we went up to the new house, pulled in the garage, and everyone finally got to check out the new place…Matt and the dogs!!


The driveway is still gravel, and we had to carefully ramp the curb…but we made it! Now that the house has a garage door on it, I just pulled it shut behind us and let the dogs run wild. They had SO much fun checking things out. The new windows are nice and low so both dogs can see out them without having to jump up. They noticed the dogs across the street already, of course!
We brought our measuring tape and all the measurements of our furniture and talked through how we thought we might put things. It was so nice for me to have Matt there to go through things with! I am not the kind of person who can easily visualize spaces and measurements, so it really helped to map it out together and make sure things would fit where we wanted them. It is just going to be so, so great!!!! The house is SO much bigger than our current home and we will just be able to spread out and enjoy. I think all of us will love it, Penny, Buddy, and Steve as well!!

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