What do you see?

During the past few weeks, Karsten has started to complain that his eye hurts.  It's typically the same eye and he will randomly yell "MY EYE IS HURTING ME.  KISS IT". We will kiss it and sometimes he'll be okay immediately and other times it lasts for a while and he seems to be in quite a bit of pain.

We dismissed it for a while as a passing fad or just two year old antics. I called the pediatrician to get her thoughts since Karsten woke up overnight saying that his eye hurt. This was concerning to me because he normally only wakes up overnight if he's sick.  Liam had his one month check up this week so I thought if she wanted to look at Karsten's eye, I could bring them in at the same time.

When I explained what was going on to the nurse, she put me on hold and checked with the doctor.  When she came back on the phone, she said the doctor would like to see Karsten today - as soon as possible.  Ummmm....okay.

Luckily, my mom and I were doing some Christmas shopping near Gail's house, so we picked Karsten up and headed over to the doctor.  I say luckily, because wrangling a two year old so the doctor can look in his eye as well as feeding the baby who decided he was hungry as soon as we got to the doctor's office would have been impossible alone.

The doctor put eye drops in Karsten's eye and looked at it with a black light to make sure there were no scratches - he was NOT a fan.  The nurse had Smarties as a reward - that helped calm him down afterwards. Thankfully, she didn't see any problems with his eyes.

To be completely sure there wasn't something else going on with his eyes, the doctor referred us to a pediatric opthamologist. They made us an appointment and warned me that the appointment could take 2 hours (what?!).

The appointment went really well - the doctor and nurse did some basic eye test questions to start with.  He didn't identify letters like we do during eye exams, he identified drawings and shapes.  They had several tricks to get him to look forward so the doctor could look into his eyes.

Then they put dilating drops in his eye and sent us out to the waiting room for 45 minutes for the drops to take effect.  Thankfully they had a toy room and Karsten was able to stay distracted and didn't notice the difference in his eyes.  I was worried that he would be scared or bothered by the dilation - it's been a while since I had it done but I remember it feeling odd.





After the drops took effect. they did several more eye tests and the doctor said his eyes looked great - no problems.  She guessed that his complaints were for attention rather than being in actual pain. So, we're going to keep an eye on it and try to isolate what could be causing his complaints.