Next step

Well to start out with good news (for a change) Grant passed the hearing test in both ears now! YAY! I was way excited about that. Also Monday he met with the pediatrician, and he's gained about an ounce per day since his last visit. That is awesome! So he was 7 lbs. 14 oz., equal to Lincoln's birthweight. What a champ!

OK enough exclamation points. Now the rest of it.

We saw a second cornea specialist Monday afternoon. We were expecting to go in and have him detail what will happen during a transplant, answer our questions and possibly even just check Grant into the hospital for surgery prep that day or set up for us to do that in 1-2 days. Instead he came in, told us he'd been in touch extensively with our pediatric opthamolagist and the cornea specialist over the weekend looking through Grant's chart as well as Lincoln's. In his opinion, he thought an immedate surgery would be really jumping the gun. His preference is to monitor it closely the next 5-6 months and perhaps it will clear up (to some degree) like Linc's did. Then we'd see if a surgery is still nessacary.

The thing is, this is a surgery that on infants has a very high likelihood of rejecting and causing irreperable damage. Once it's done it can't be undone just re-done. On the other hand, if an infant goes too long after birth without vision, at some point the brain just shuts off it's ability to process vision even if the eyes get fixed. After that point it cannot be restarted, it's that way for life. It's very uncertain when that point is. But the drs seem confident that it's not happened yet. So it's this HUGE hard choice to make on behalf of our little Grant, is when to get this done. And we hear from one guy last week,"Do it next week. Soon." and then from another guy,"We can wait a few months and he'll probably be better off if we don't do this in haste."

It's been really hard to decide who is right, what we should do. We're still not any closer to deciding. So we thought a 3rd and 4th opinion may help. But who knows, maybe then we'll just have 4 differing opinions to select from instead of 2. Whatever. Sunday night we're going to fly to LA and meet a doctor there and one in San Diego, return home Tuesday morning. We're even going to try to visit some family while in sunny CA. And we'll update as soon as we can about how that goes.

Got pictures. Will post those tomorrow.