It's a laser

Jacob had laser eye surgery yesterday :(. Premature babies are at risk for something called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) The retinal blood vessels are one of the last structures of the eyes to mature and since Jacob was born so early his did not have a chance to mature and began to grow abnormally. Doctors have been watching his eyes very closely the last month and decided that both of his eyes had abnormal blood vessel growth and had to perform surgery before they got any worse. Some of the things doctors are worried about is that the blood vessels instead of growing out will begin to grow on top of one another creating ridges, these ridges if left untreated can result in retinal detachment, sever ROP can cause serious vision lost or blindness.

So his eye exam was at 5:30 am yesterday, the doctor called me at 7:30 am and the procedure was scheduled for 2pm . The ophthalmologist told me that Jacob has a 90% chance that the laser surgery will be a success, if not there is a 10% chance that they will have to do the procedure again. Luckily Jacob's blood vessels have progress into what they call zone 2. Zone 1 is your central vision, zone 2 is your peripheral vision and zone 3 is some part that we don't even use. So even with the surgery Jacob will lose some of his peripheral vision but because his vessels have grown out to zone 2 the ophthalmologist said that he won't even know he doesn't have some of his peripheral vision.

My poor baby was sedated and wheeled off to another room for the procedure. The doctors did warn me that he would have more spells due to the procedure and the medications that they gave him. The procedure took about an hour and I was told he did need to be bagged once at the beginning, they let him rest for awhile and continued without any other incidents. Once he came back he was still pretty tired and didn't really wake up until midnight. He did have another spell at 5am but didn't need to be bagged. This morning his nurse told me he looks good and alert.

We have been very fortunate so far that this is the only procedure he's needed and I'm crossing my fingers that he won't fall into the 10% that will need to have the treatment repeated.