It's official. Poodle is getting glasses. Poor kid, between her parents' genes and her clefts, she never stood a chance. She was always going to get glasses eventually to physically protect her eyes, but she also has a pretty awful astigmatism in her right eye that needs immediate attention. Of course.

I learned a lot about vision at this ophthalmology appointment. One is that I will never in my life be able to spell "ophthalmology" without the assistance of spell check. But mainly that your vision is not just about your eyeballs, it's about how your brain learns to interpret input from your eyes and other senses and when it stops learning. The glasses will correct the input before it gets sent to her brain. Without the glasses, the input would travel to the brain distorted and the path from the eye to the brain would warp and warp until the brain is like, enough, your vision is completely jacked. Which, turns out, is pretty much what happened with her left eye.

Your eye has to develop in the right place and at the right time in order to have a clear cornea. S does not have a clear cornea; lord knows the journey on which her left eye traveled during fetal development. Also, at some point her eye tissue dried out, resulting in scar tissue covering the front of her eye. So, she has a cloudy cornea that is covered in scar tissue. At two weeks old she had that ultrasound where they determined that at best, she was maybe getting a spec of light into her eye and up to her brain.Your brain develops and learns to utilize most of its visual pathways early in life. If no input comes in, your brain doesn't develop the pathways. And at some point your brain stops even trying. The brain ain't waiting around for a spec of light. So she will never be able to see out of her left eye. Ever. Scientists could develop all sorts of amazing, weird transplants and it wouldn't matter unless they could also reinvent her brain.

We asked the doctor about any future possibility of vision in her left eye because we are in the process of considering/working out a plan for a prosthetic. We are extremely conflicted about it in general, but at least now we don't have the burden of wondering if we are the ones removing a chance for her to see out of that eye by replacing it with a prosthetic.

However, I was still emotional when the doctor told she was unequivocally forever blind in her left eye, unless science and reality change. Not because it matters in any actual way, Poodle's gonna poodle. I'm just too sentimental of a person and I don't really like hope being shut down. I was also simultaneously processing that she will now always be wearing glasses. Which, again, doesn't matter, she has little buddies who wear glasses, and it will of course be good for her. But, I don't know, baby glasses take up a lot of face real estate and are not subtle, and it felt a little like I was losing sight of another face.

Oh well, it's happening. The astigmatism and depth perception issues are definitely contributing to her overall balance problems, so I look forward to seeing the effects of proper vision.

Bonus ankle band update: we took her in to see the pediatrician on Friday. She called the ortho team at Dell. They said that it's only their thing if the foot is turning inwards, otherwise it goes to plastics. Lucky for us, we already have a plastic surgeon. So, we're going to see him at the beginning of March. We're considering having a PT eval done on her in the meantime. I might wait to see how the glasses affect the walking, but I think having a PT report would help the surgeon know what he's dealing with. We'll see.