Balls

Tennisballs. Eyeballs. Proceed with caution and never mix the two together. It has seemed inappropriate until now to blog at a time like this but I feel ready now. In case you haven't heard what happened, Ill give a little recap. Brady was playing a friendly game of tennis last Wednesday night when he was suddenly caught of gaurd inbetween matches and took a tennis ball straight in the eye. Not above, not below, directly in his eye. From that second on our night went something like this. Brady: "I can't see anything" (hand covering eye). Ok, well, let's get you some ice and it's time to leave. Ice. Driving home, (ring, ring) Me: "Katherine (Jenkins), Umm Brady got hit pretty hard in the eye, should we just keep ice on it or what?" Katherine "Is it bleeding, look at it" Me: (pulling over, looking at Brady's eye for the first time) "UMMMMM OH MY GOSH CAN WE COME OVER...." If you didn't know, Bradys has the most beautiful green eyes. I fell in love with them almost instantly when we met. But Wednesday night, when I looked at his right eye it was completly brown. The white of his eye was red. It was scary to say the least. We rushed over the Katherine's and she looked at it. Flashlight checking his eyes. Katherine after examining: "Um you need to go to the ER right now, your pupil is fixed, and uh it should NEVER do that.." Since I was a shaking disaster by this time, Katherine was gracious enough to drive us to the ER at 11:30 at night. We got there, they got us in and started to examine Brady further. On top of everything, while they were checking the pressure in his eye, he blacked out. It was then a big rush of the dr. trying to bring Brady back, calling for help, me freaking out cause I don't know what's going on, and them wheeling him away to hook him up to monitor his vital signs. For the next 2 hours I proceeded to stay by his side trying to keep the poor guy awake while we waited for the results and the doctor's diagnosis. Finally he came back and explained the the color change was due to Hyphema, bleeding in the eye. That was also the cause of a lot of the blurriness that Brady was experiencing. The passing out was a combo of the pain, the pushing on his eye and the stress of the situation. Finally, he also had some corneal abrasions. They made an emergency appt with the opthomologist for the next morning, gave us some drops to put in his eye and sent us home. The next day Brady received a blessing and we went in to see the doc. He does a much more thorough anaylsis of Brady and concludes that the impact was strong enough to have caused some damage to his retina. This was very scary for us because your retina, there's basically no fixin it, unless your body says yea, we can fix this. At that point, the doc was fairly optamistic about the whole situation but couldn't give us any concrete answers. He said there was still inflamation of the retina and blood in the eye, we would have to give it a few days, see you on Monday. We were very concerned. But luckily we are blessed with wonderful friends and family that are very supportive. A lot of praying and fasting later we began to feel much better about the situation. When we went in on Monday the doctor said that there was no bad news. The cloudiness in Brady's retina seemed to have gone and that the general condition of his eye seemed to be improving. The blurriness he was still experiencing was due to the blood still in his eye. That just takes time to go away. So even with that positive news, we are still praying for everything to go smoothly from here on out in relation to his eye and his recovery. There is still a chance that thing's could not work out as hoped but we feel really optimistic about the situation. Brady has been wonderful through this whole thing, I just can't even imagine how scary it must have been for him and still is to have something as delicate and important as your eye be put in jeopardy. I want to say thank you to everyone for all the continuing love and support and prayers and faith we have received though this scary time. We go in again on Friday morning for another doctor appt. Until then, we just have faith things will continue to move forward and his eye will continue to heal.