Sleepless nights.

It has been a while since I have written in the blog. I guess I have needed a little time for everything in me to settle down. I don't know which way is up or which way is down at the moment.

For the passed 12 months, Zoe has had 6 eye exams. She was only meant to have 4 (1 every 3 months) but we took her 2 times on an emergency visit because she had pain in her eyes. For the first 2 Eye exams there was no sign of inflammation in her eyes, however for the 3rd they notices small amounts of "old inflammation" (She had had a flare up 15 days prior to that appointment).

3 Weeks ago Zoe started complaining of sore eyes again, so we took her to the hospital and they did a quick check for inflammation and we were happy to find out that there wasn't any. So we wanted to know why she had pain and they asked us to come back the following week for a thorough check up. Off we went with drops to put in her eyes for 7 days to open up her irises. Last week we took her back and low and behold her Vision is not good at all. They have a scale here in France from 0 - 5.
0 being 20/20 vision and 5 being highly vision impaired to legally blind. We were told Zoe is at 3.

Now we are wondering how this could have been missed during the last 5 exams? Was she born this way? Is it the disease (We know her eyesight can be greatly affected)? Did the resident do her job properly the first 4 times? (The 5th and 6th was a different resident) Or worst of all could it be a side effect of her treatment?

There is not enough information out there on this drug to know what kind of side effect may arise. Zoe was only 19 months old when she started this drug, when normally she should have been over 2 years of age. We should have asked more questions, done more research but we were desperate for her to be out of pain. Admittedly we were not given other options besides, operations and going from 1 needle of Kineret a day to 2, when she was already having horrible side effects from that.

I hope that Zoe's loss of vision is not due to the medicine because then we will have a very difficult decision to make.

We have asked for a second opinion  and we are now just waiting to hear from the Ophthalmologist in Paris in the hopes that we can get an appointment relatively quickly. I will write more when I have more info.