The little girl with the big eyes

Looking at this little girl, I wasn't sure just how this operation was going to go. I mean, put a sharp knife in these eyes, really?

She's the one I asked for prayer for last week....She's 13 months old and has congenital glaucoma, so her eye pressure is too high and without an operation she will soon be completely, pitch-dark blind in both eyes. However, even with an operation she is likely to reach this state in a matter of years anyway - it's just a very difficult condition to treat.

Thank you so much for your prayers. In the states, I would probably only see this disease this advanced a few times in my life, and if I did, I would refer the patient to a glaucoma specialist/pediatric ophthalmologist for surgery. If for some reason I didn't refer, I would have done some other surgery than what I did here for this little one (like trabeculotomy), but here we don't have the equipment needed to do these specialized surgeries, so I did the same surgery I do here for adults: trabeculectomy (although for her, unlike for adults, I did both eyes at the same time because of undergoing general anesthesia in these conditions).

Above, this is yesterday and we're starting anesthesia for her. The surgery itself was interesting for me - remarkable for the amazing stretching of thin tissues, the resiliency of a child, the delicateness of the design. And praying and operating really go quite well together! God's hand was evident at each step, but especially at critical times. She pulled through well.

Here she is, all patched up at the end of surgery. Unfortunately we don't have eye shields that are the right size for children, but these work fine! :)

Today, postoperative day 1, we took the patches off, but being a typical 13-mo old, she wasn't very interested in having her eyes examined. I got as far as seeing that her eyes looked like they are in a safe condition (the anterior chamber is formed), and had to be content with that for now. I'll probably have to do an exam under anesthesia to measure the pressure sometime in the near future. Here she is with her mother, being restrained as we did the exam.