An indignant father

My wife and I took our youngest son to the doctor during my time off work this week. He has a condition called Ptosis (pronounced TOE-sis) this is a medical term for drooping eyelid. This is not a life threatening condition but unchecked could lead to degraded or even loss of vision. This is a kind of shocking thought, that your child could conceivably loose sight in one of his eyes. We have been instructed to begin therapy to strengthen his weaker eye by covering his “good” eye for an hour a day with a patch and return for a follow up visit in a month. The visit with the doctor left me with the distinct impression (though not the confirmed diagnosis) that my son will end up needing surgery to correct this, but his physician prefers to pursue this kind of treatment when a child is closer to two years old. Ethan will be a year old in May. I am grateful that this doctor would rather evaluate his development for a while before putting my boy under the knife this makes me feel some comfort that this is neither irreversible nor so urgent that drastic steps must be taken immediately to reverse the current course of his condition. Frankly my feelings are a little mixed up about this entire thing, on one hand I know this is not a horrible thing and with proper care could be corrected, but on the other hand no one wants their child to be burdened with anything remotely negative let alone something that could be considered a health issue. Though I know this is not possible for anyone who walks the same earth that you and I do. I feel a little selfish too, knowing that there are parents in the world at this very second who have no idea where their child will get their next meal and the last thing they did eat was not likely to qualify as a meal by our standards. But at the same time I am upset that my child has to overcome this at all even though he is far too young to understand or even perceive my indignation. I don’t know were I to go with this and can only assume that I needed simply get this off my chest. If you pray, or even if you don’t please think of my little boy and all the other little defenseless sprouts that need us to look out for them and when you do, wish them well. Maybe it will do you and I some good to take our minds off the petty little issues that clutter up our lives for a moment or two and think of someone else.