Ocularist

Seeing the ocularist continues to be the most difficult appointment for Anya.  As a quick reminder - the ocularist is the person that makes her prosthetic eye.  He is not a doctor, but a skilled technician.  The nature of his job means that he has a wealth of medical knowledge in the area of eyes.  Anya seems to like him as a person, for she was quite happy to march into his office and upon seeing him immediately, said, "Hi Walter!"  The whole scene changes, however, when we are back in the room where he actually looks at her eye.

We talked plenty about this appointment in the last week.  At times, just the mention of it brought tears. Other times, Anya was stoic, saying she thought she could do it this time.  This is the one place that I take Anya to that I cannot predict how or what she will do.  Other places, she typically does what she says she is going to do, but at the ocularist, it feels completely up in the air.

She hates having her prosthetic taken out.  To be fair to her, wouldn't you?  It is innate to us to protect our eyes, isn't it?  Some people cannot even tolerate contacts because it is so difficult to touch their eyes.  Now imagine being six years old and having a man, who is nice, though gruff, try to put a suction cup on your eye, and take it out.  In the past, we have physically restrained her.  Today, we did the same, yet it did not work.  She was so resistant, that her eyes were closing too much and wouldn't allow the prosthesis to be taken out.

The hope was to take it out and clean it, but since nothing more serious than that needed to be done, we decided to stop.  He was able to see that the prosthesis is fitting well, and was happy with that.  Anya is due to go under anesthesia for an MRI in a month's time and we are going to try to schedule the ocularist to see her at the hospital at that time.