Gray Spot Scare

Last night, just as we were about to turn in, my son came and asked me whether the redness in his Coates eye had increased. My heart skipped a beat. His eye has been very mildly red in the area where he underwent a second round of cryopexy in mid-October. The doctor says it will take time to fade away.

Anyway, I looked at his eye and it looked just the same. I asked him if he was in pain. He said the gray spot was back. (He'd mentioned this once in November and we took him to the doctor, who said it was probably fluid pressure. It would go away in a few days, he said, and sure enough, it did.)

I wrote down a few words which he can read, mixing them up with numbers and taking care to see that he couldn't look at what I was writing. I wrote it lightly in pencil, on a white sheet and we were in a room with no bright lighting. Then, I closed his left eye and asked him to read the stuff with his Coates eye. He did that without any problems whatsoever - without taking extra time and without tilting his head to peer out of the corner of his eye. He also said that the gray spot was there, but that the pencil was darker so he could clearly read everything.

I then made the mistake of asking him whether he saw any flashes, or floaters - bits of light appearing and disappearing - and what color they were: gray, orange, red? The story took a turn after that. He said it was orange and then green and now it wasn't there anymore. But he also drew me a proper picture of his earlier gray spot with his crayons.

To cut a long story short - and after having thought about this half the night, I think this is what happened. He probably does have a gray spot in his vision again but it is possible it has disappeared. I'm not going to worry about the other stuff because knowing him, it is possible that his imagination had interfered! But I do know he's not the kind of kid to have come and enquired about redness in his Coates eye if everything was fine.

We'll take him to the neighborhood eye doctor later today. He was, after all, the person who first suspected that my son had Coates Disease. So I trust him. His specialist is in a hospital that's a fair distance away and there's usually a long waiting line. Besides, the little fellow hates to have his eyes dilated. I'm hoping that won't be necessary this evening.

Dear God, please let this be a temporary problem with no greater negative implications.