during The Nightly BedTime Ritual we often like to tell each other Tall Tales, improvising and evolving them with grander and grander plot twists.

if you’re relatively new to odin’s adventures, the following may seem to be just such a tall tale, but it’s as True as True could be.

a few days ago i took odin to his umpty billionth eye exam and we were all quite pleased to hear that his sight has continued its gradual improvement over the past year! his eyesight is 20/30 which is almost normal for a 5 year old ( typically 20/25 ). there’s even a chance that he might not need glasses, which i find hard to believe since both of his parents are nearsighted. but even more importantly, his retinas look astonishingly healthy as his eyes continue to grow, which is remarkable given all the scar tissue on his retinas from the surgery that prevented him from going blind.

and so, perhaps, five years later we can think a little less about retinopathy of prematurity. it proved the curse of the nicu to be true and caused an emergency transport to a new, scary nicu and an emergency laser surgery with 1,500 burns in each eye and innummerable eye exams with dilated pupils and bright lights shone in odin’s eyes. its effects brought news of possible legal blindness and the day we thought he had really gone blind only to discover he had a late vitreous hemmorhage ( eye filled with blood ) that somehow, improbably, had no associated retinal damage.

perhaps.