GUILTY AS CHARGED

I'm feeling incredibly guilty this week. Why do you ask? Simple. After my mom called to tell me that my son's eye looked kind of swollen (he had been hit in the eye last weekend with a pool toy) and that I should call the doctor, I told her to wet some cotton balls, put it on his bloodshot eye and I'd take him to the doctor in the morning.

Well, luckily, she didn't listen to me and called my husband who proceeded to make an appointment at the pediatrician and we learned that we had to take him to an opthamologist. When I came home from work, the poor kid looked as if he had been in a brawl - and he lost. His eye was completely swollen and bloodshot and while he wasn't crying, I was about to break down in tears because I stupidly decided to stay at work rather than take him to the doctor.

My husband tried to convince me that it was okay -he had it handled, but I still felt awful so the next morning, I made the appointment with the specialist and we proceeded to spend the next hour and a half checking out his eye.

When we arrived, the doctor decided to give him an eye test and as I sat there watching him attempt to read letters and then pictures (because his alphabet still needs work), I was literally on edge. When he looked at a duck and called it a dog, and then squinted at a car and called it an anchor, I started to sweat. Oh my God, he's losing his vision, I started thinking to myself. I tried to hold myself back when he mistook a birthday cake for a hand and then when the doctor finished the exam, I quickly explained that he aced his eye test back in the summer so I didn't know why he was having trouble that morning. The doctor actually wasn't that concerned - thank goodness and proceeded to check out every possible angle of his eye. He dosed him several times with drops, peered into his pupils and then finally made the diagnosis...

He hadn't injured his eye, he must have picked up some nasty viral or bacterial infection and all we had to do was take a few eye drops and the situation would probably clear up in a week. And here I was thinking that my son was losing his vision because he had smacked himself in the eye with a plastic pool toy. I'm thrilled beyond belief that it was nothing serious and from here on out, I'll listen when someone tells me that my son's eye is the size of a watermelon and I need to take him to the doctor!