Monday was K’s appointment with the neurologist. He asked lots of questions, observed her, and checked her out. Since she still has the nystagmus and sometimes holds her head in a strange way to look out of the corner of her eyes (rather than straight ahead) and since sometimes when she turns her head her eyes will follow late, he’s ordered an MRI. We know that the nystagmus is not caused by a problem in her eyes (according to the pediatric ophthalmologist) so this is the next step. The neurologist says that it could be caused by something in her brain but the other end of that is that if they don’t find it with the MRI, then it’s “just one of those things” and we may never know why it happens and she might grow out of it. A good thing to hear, too, was that he said the grade 1 brain hemorrhage is pretty much inconsequential. He said that almost always those grade 1′s amount to nothing. That is very good to know, the back of my mind has always been concerned with that maybe causing problems for her in the future. He also said that the main concern of the nystagmus, at least right now, is that it could cause tracking problems for her in the future, such as when she’s trying to read and needs to follow along a page in a line, etc.

So the MRI has been set and pre-certified by our insurance so we’re good to go. It’s not going to be fun, though. They’re going to have to sedate her because there is no way she’ll hold still long enough. And so that also means that we have to be up there at 8:15am that day and she’s not allowed to have anything to drink or eat after midnight. That part is going to stink because she’s going to get VERY cranky. But who can blame her??

My father-in-law had his second round of chemo the other day. He’s already losing his hair, too. I don’t know how long that usually takes to get started for people, but it’s going quickly on him. I was so hoping he’d keep his hair, I know he really wanted to, but I don’t guess anyone is surprised. Unlike most men his age (and younger — including his 3 sons) he still has (now had) a full hair. Hopefully it will grow back when it’s all said and done. Elijah, however, is waiting because he’s decided that if Grandpa is going to be bald, so will he. I’ve promised him that when Grandpa loses the last bit of his hair, he can shave his all off. This oughta be interesting. But anyway, hair is really inconsequential, as we know. His treatments have been going well so far and he has to go in every 3 weeks. The doctors did tell him that they are unable to find signs of cancer outside of his lymph nodes, so it looks pretty isolated and looks like they caught it at a good time. (As good as anything can be when you’re talking cancer.)

Now this is really interesting, to us at least. A couple of weeks ago, Elijah was acting like he couldn’t see the words on the book in front of his face. We held it further away and such and he acted like he couldn’t see it. I knew I needed an eye appointment so that same day I made an appointment for both of us, for me first so he could see it wasn’t so bad, then for him. Of course, since that day, I’ve not seen him acting like he can’t see anything and he’s been going around the last few days yelling at me, “MAMA! My eyes are perfectly FINE, I don’t need to go to the eye doctor!!”

But it was good I took him in anyway because it turns out that his left eye is lazy and is so far-sighted that if you take away the right eye, he can’t see anything at all. The doctor would cover up E’s right eye and immediately E would start getting all nervous and said he couldn’t see anything at all and would fidget and try to get away from whatever it was covering his eyes. The doctor said that he was probably born like this, but we never saw it because his lazy eye doesn’t include pointing in the right direction and his right eye is perfect (or very near perfect) and compensates very well.

The closest we came to noticing this was when Steve was teaching him how to shoot the BB gun. Since he’s a lefty he’d hold the gun on his left side but he was leaning over to try to look through the sights with his right eye. Steve came to the conclusion that he is right-eye dominant, though left handed. It didn’t seem strange to us at the time probably, in part, because though we know his left hand is dominant, he almost seems cross-dominant at times.

But the doctor said it was good we found this out now. He said that when they get more around age 11 or 12, that it becomes harder to fix this. He seemed confident that this is fix-able and said that it’s also good that there’s not a cross-eyed or looking off in the wrong direction issue. Elijah’s now going to go to the same pediatric ophthalmologist that K goes to. She has a follow-up appointment in May and the office was kindly enough to let me work E in there at the same time.

Color me baffled, though, I had no idea that lazy eyes were more than an eye that looked in the wrong direction. Apparently, I know nothing.

All this medical stuff has me going ahhhhhhhhhh when I think about our insurance running out but Steve called yesterday and we found out that the insurance is good through January 31, 2011.