What was that I said in a previous post about us not counting our post-op chickens? Well, there’s a second surgery on the cards for Little, in fact, it’s not just on the cards, it’s booked… 8am Monday 20 February. Yes, just seven sleeps away.

Turns out her combo squint has a further ‘combo’ element to it. Like I said to the Doc when he told us…“Of course it does.” I mean, why would any part of this  journey we embarked on 16 months ago be straightforward?

So I can hear you saying to yourself while you read this… “But I thought the first op was a success?” It was. The first op was to correct the muscular cause of her squinting (in both eyes) along the horizontal plane (left-to-right), which it did… all 25-degrees of it. So, with her glasses on (correcting the other 20-degrees caused by her far-sightedness) her eyes are dead straight… until she looks up or long-distance.

In the words (er, lyrics of) Tag Team, Whoomp! There it is… the reason for op number two. No longer able to squint left-to-right as much as they were accustomed to, her little eyeballs have decided to misbehave in the vertical plane – darting up and to the left or up and to the right when she spots something in the distance that piques her interest like ‘bed’ (code for birds).

“But don’t all eyeballs go up and down, to the left or the right, depending on where they’re looking?” Yes. But Little’s left eyeball and right eyeball don’t work together, at present they’re not team players. Instead of working like a power couple (think, Michelle and Barack; Faith and Tim; Basetsane and Romeo) they’re more into going their separate ways (think, Brangelina). Plus, when her glasses are off and she wants to look into the distance or upwards, she’s started closing one eye in a the style of a super scrunched up wink to focus. Not good.

“But is that really such a big deal? Do you have to operate… again?” Yes, definitely. As it stands Little’s updated diagnosis is that of ‘a bilateral upward gaze deviation’, which is pretty straightforward to correct because her side-to-side and downward gaze/s are as they should be… for now. If we don’t correct the ‘upward gaze deviation’ in both eyes it will develop into what is known as V-Pattern exotropia. Think of ‘V-Pattern’ (or its buddy A-Pattern) as the f-word of the strabismus world… if V-Pattern corrective surgery were a Masterchef finale, it would be the Heston Blumenthal pressure test… complicated with plenty of pressure points.

So, this past Friday, sitting in the Doc’s consulting room, this mama (being 28 weeks pregnant) put her bigger than usual big girl panties on – Daddy did the male equivalent – and we booked the surgery date confident in the knowledge that when our Doc says ‘Go!’ we go.

Now all that’s left to do is keep our collective sanity in tact through that whole ‘nil by mouth’ thing after midnight. Not for sissies when your 2-year old can’t fathom a universe without a 3am ‘more’ (code for 200ml of Nan 3) … wish us luck. The hour-long 05h30 drive to Pretoria for a 06h00 ‘check-in’ should be about as fun as a root canal without anaesthetic.