trying something creative
May. 13th, 2024 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jdmkleinWhoever thinks a person with a disability cannot do all the things a "normal" person can . Let me tell you they are absofuckinglutely W.R.O.N.G. wrong. My daughter, Sarah, can do anything you can do but she may have to come at it from a different angle.
Sarah began losing her vision when she was in the 7th grade. At the beginning of the school year, there was a regular eye exam given by the school nurse. She called me after Sarah's exam and suggested that I take her to have her eyes examined. For whatever reason I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist. The visit all started normally but it seemed to me that Sarah was in the exam room for a very long time. After what seemed to be an eternity, the eye doctor came out and asked me to come into the exam room with Sarah. There he explained to me that Sarah had a vision problem that lenes couldn't correct and he was going to make an appointment for Sarah at the eye clinic at the University of Iowa eye clinic.
This frightened me but I wanted my daughter to have the best life she could and if it meant going to Iowa City to figure out what was going on, that is what will be done. The appointment was made for a week later. Sarah and I had a nice drive down, we chatted about all the normal stuff, and in the quiet times, I tried to figure out why I hadn't noticed anything. Then it came to me that whenever she played the piano, Sarah would turn her head to the left so that the right eye would have a fuller view of the notes on the page. I felt so bad. Being raised Catholic and going to a Catholic school helped instill in me the Christian version of Jewish guilt.
We got to the clinic and Sarah was taken in for her eye exam. Then we had to go to another area of the eye clinic so other tests could be performed. Finally, she was sent to get a CAT scan. The scan was the key. It was discovered that Sarah had a tumor the size of a grapefruit on the left side of her brain. Until the surgery no one knew how problematic that would be.
The surgery had grown so large that parts of it and begun to wrap itself around the optic nerve in the left eye. Dr. Arnold Meneses, the surgeon, tried 108 times to cut the tumor out of Sarah's head but had real trouble with the area around the optic nerve He couldn't get it all without damaging her vision enough to make her blind in her left eye. When she was in recovery Dr. Meneses took me to a family consult room and explained what had happened. To make a long explanation short, the surgeon couldn't remove the entire the entire tumor and there was a very strong possibility it would grow back. It did.
After two more surgeries and radiotherapy, the tumor finally stopped growing. By then Sarah had no sight in her left eye and only peripheral vision in her right
Sarah began losing her vision when she was in the 7th grade. At the beginning of the school year, there was a regular eye exam given by the school nurse. She called me after Sarah's exam and suggested that I take her to have her eyes examined. For whatever reason I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist. The visit all started normally but it seemed to me that Sarah was in the exam room for a very long time. After what seemed to be an eternity, the eye doctor came out and asked me to come into the exam room with Sarah. There he explained to me that Sarah had a vision problem that lenes couldn't correct and he was going to make an appointment for Sarah at the eye clinic at the University of Iowa eye clinic.
This frightened me but I wanted my daughter to have the best life she could and if it meant going to Iowa City to figure out what was going on, that is what will be done. The appointment was made for a week later. Sarah and I had a nice drive down, we chatted about all the normal stuff, and in the quiet times, I tried to figure out why I hadn't noticed anything. Then it came to me that whenever she played the piano, Sarah would turn her head to the left so that the right eye would have a fuller view of the notes on the page. I felt so bad. Being raised Catholic and going to a Catholic school helped instill in me the Christian version of Jewish guilt.
We got to the clinic and Sarah was taken in for her eye exam. Then we had to go to another area of the eye clinic so other tests could be performed. Finally, she was sent to get a CAT scan. The scan was the key. It was discovered that Sarah had a tumor the size of a grapefruit on the left side of her brain. Until the surgery no one knew how problematic that would be.
The surgery had grown so large that parts of it and begun to wrap itself around the optic nerve in the left eye. Dr. Arnold Meneses, the surgeon, tried 108 times to cut the tumor out of Sarah's head but had real trouble with the area around the optic nerve He couldn't get it all without damaging her vision enough to make her blind in her left eye. When she was in recovery Dr. Meneses took me to a family consult room and explained what had happened. To make a long explanation short, the surgeon couldn't remove the entire the entire tumor and there was a very strong possibility it would grow back. It did.
After two more surgeries and radiotherapy, the tumor finally stopped growing. By then Sarah had no sight in her left eye and only peripheral vision in her right
