Day +1407: Recovering well from surgery

Just a quick update to say that Mina's surgery went well, and she is recovering nicely at home this week. Dr. Good said she had a dense cataract, so it's good we are getting it done now. Mina has had to wear a rigid patch all week to protect the eye, and she hasn't been back to school yet. We can take the patch off Sunday, but we'll probably put it back on when she goes to bed Sunday night. She has been a very good sport. She was very brave going to the hospital, but just before the operation when we were waiting in the pre-op room, she got scared and just buried her head on my shoulder. But she was fine when she came out of the operation, and she enjoyed the popsicle and movie in the hospital room.

She hasn't felt any pain, but the eye patch is uncomfortable and she's been kind of bored at home. Wednesday was a very hard day for her, she was whiny and fragile and she did not want to let us put her eye drops in. She has slowly gotten used to the idea, and tonight she gamely held down her eyelid to make it easier for me. We are going to take it kind of easy this weekend, but next week she will be back in school and basically back to normal. At some point over the next few weeks she needs to go and get glasses and/or contact lenses. And we will need to schedule the surgery for her left eye. We won't be looking forward to that, but it needs to happen.

Isaac has had a tough week too. Teacher Julie said there was one point on Tuesday where he started crying because "Sissy's sad". But Thursday he had a rough day at school. He was overtired, and he kind of loses control when he gets that way. He wasn't treating the other kids very well, particularly some of the younger kids. Things have been a bit unsettled for a while now, and I know that takes its toll on Isaac. He definitely has some anxieties that come out at times, and Julie thinks some of it might be related to cancer sibling issues, i.e., the complex emotions from worrying about his sister but also feeling jealous and abandoned because of the attention she is getting. We've been kind of assuming that he wouldn't have many of the sibling issues we've heard about because neither he nor Mina have any memories of her cancer treatment. But this is an indication that just all the followup treatment could be enough to trigger some of the same issues.

The kids have been asking lots of questions this week about medical issues and when Mina was in the hospital. Mina asked the obvious question why she had to have cataract surgery and Isaac didn't. So that has led to discussions about her leukemia and what things were like when we were in the hospital and what Isaac was doing, etc. I just try to answer the questions the best I can in ways they can understand.

Day +1403: Mina's surgery

Mina is having her eye surgery tomorrow, Tuesday, March 3. They will do her right eye tomorrow, see how she recovers, and then do her left eye in a month or two. Cataract surgery is usually pretty routine, though complications can occur. She is scheduled to go in at 10:15, and the surgery is outpatient so we will all be back home tomorrow night. She will need to take it easy for a few days, and probably won't go back to school until Monday. Isaac will go to school during the morning, and then one of us will pick him up at 2:30. We will have to work with him about not being rough with his sister. Not that he generally is, but he sometimes gets careless and will give her a shove every once in a while when he is overtired.

It has been difficult to get used to the idea of more medical procedures for Mina. We have been so blessed over the last three years not to have to deal with anything like that. I could almost put the whole ordeal out of my mind and pretend that live was totally normal, except for that glow of pride and satisfaction that Mina is doing so well. This has kind of shattered that a little bit, not that it's totally unexpected or that I ever really could forget. It still will be weird tomorrow going to the operating room. Mina seems to be taking it in stride. We had an orientation tonight at the hospital with a child-life specialist, who brought in some dolls and play toys and used them to tell Mina all about what the operation was going to be like. She was really good, and I think the whole experience was very beneficial for both Mina and Isaac. Mina even likes the idea of getting glasses, though I suspect she won't be so happy when she sees how thick they will be. Still, it feels like her vision is really deteriorating so hopefully she will notice some improvement when this is all over and done with.

Lots of other stuff going on as well. The kids and I spent a week in Washington, first at Teri's house in Lake Stevens, then in Wenatchee and then to Winthrop for a ski weekend with my parents and my sister's family. Keri stayed home and got some cleaning done and decompressed. It was good for Mina and Isaac to have some quality time together. Isaac had been having a really hard time after Mina switched schools. I think he missed his sister a lot and felt left out with how excited Mina is to go to Grattan. He's been acting out in a variety of ways and having a hard time at school. And in an attempt to help ease Mina's transition, Keri had been scheduling play dates for Mina with her NPG friends. But a lot of time when Mina has a friend over, Isaac gets left out, so I think that only exacerbated the transition problems for Isaac. But he and Mina spent a lot of time playing together at Auntie Teri's house, and I think that time really helped them get their relationship back on an even keel.

Both the kids enjoyed skiing. Mina really figured it out this year and skiied for a long time. Mom and Dad invented a tow rope for Carmen a few years ago, and Mina really got the hang of that this year. She would ski for a while, then hang on to the wooden handle while Grandma or Grandpa pulled her along. Carmen is a great skiier now at 8 and doesn't need the tow rope anymore. In fact, she towed Mina for over an hour one afternoon! Isaac did some skiing too, though he enjoys riding in the pulk so much that he wasn't real motivated to keep on his feet. We stayed in a rental house again and saw lots of deer, which is always exciting for the kids. They did so well that I would like to try to get them up again this year, so we may try to figure out how to get up to Tahoe on a Saturday. There has been a lot of new snow up there the last few weeks, so there should be skiing at least through the end of March.

Isaac has really been into music again lately. He always enjoys it and likes playing his instruments, but there had been a stretch where he had been more interested in playing trains and cars. But Auntie Teri made the kids CDs of The Sound of Music, and Isaac has not put it away since. He used to play "Choo Choo Boogaloo" on the CD player, and would play one song over and over again until he got tired of it, then moved on to another song, etc., until one day he just stopped listening to the CD altogether. This was sometime back in the early fall, and he hadn't shown much interest in the CD player since then. But when we got The Sound of Music CD, he all of a sudden wanted to control the CD player again, but he had forgotten how to use it! I had to show him all over again how to start the CD and how to skip from song to song. Now he's doing the same thing with that CD, listening to one song at a time until he figures it out, then moving on to the next song. One time he was listening to the orchestral music that plays during the intermission, which is kind of a medley of all the songs, and when they played a few bars from "My Favorite Things" he said "that's nice that they play songs people love during Intermission". Mina loves that CD too. Her favorite song is "So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehn, good night". She also likes the "16 going on 17". One day she said to me "Daddy, he says he's going to take care of her, but he's just the next age up!"

Both Mina and Isaac got to play Grandma Judy's organ at Grace Lutheran, and they both really enjoyed that. Another thing that Isaac has been doing is taking wooden chopstick, stuffing it into the end of his plastic toy saxophone, and saying it's a bassoon.

But I've saved the best for last: Mina and Isaac both started violin lessons yesterday! We had been wanting to start them at the beginning of the year but were having trouble finding a teacher. So we enrolled them in a Eurythmics class instead at the SF Conservatory of Music. Well, we finally found a violin teacher, and with Mina in public school now instead of at NPG we are saving some money, so Keri signed them both up for violin lessons. They will be taught using the Suzuki Method, where they start learning by ear before they can read music. We went on Saturday to a violin makers' shop in the city and rented two violins. That was a really fun experience. He had a shop on the second floor of a nondescript building, but it was all full of violins, violas and cellos. Isaac's eyes got really big and he was all business while he was there. He is usually shy around strangers but he kept talking up the violin maker, asking him all kinds of questions. Now he is incredibly excited about the violin. He knows it's not a toy, but he can't resist taking it out of its case and he's constantly wanting to play it. Last night right before he went to bed he went into the closet and got the violin case and brought it into his room and put it next to his bed. Today they had their first session with the teacher. She started by teaching them how to hold the bow, how to hold the violin, and how to bow with the violin. Hopefully they will start playing a little bit next week. Isaac played for almost an hour Sunday afternoon. Mina likes it too and is excited, but not quite in the same way. Mina is pretty interested in music, but in more of a normal way. We will see how it goes with both of them. Hopefully they will enjoy it and want to stick with it. I'll try to post some pictures soon.

Thank you for keeping Mina in your thoughts and prayers tomorrow and for the rest of this week as she recovers from her surgery.