Where did you all go?

It's almost 2 weeks since our last post. And what a couple of weeks it's been. Did we go on a holiday? Sonewhere far away and exotic? Did we have fun? Well, we guess the answer is....a little of both....and a whole lot of not fun right in the middle.

We'll try to bring you up to speed over the next couple of days but for now the big news is that Grandma Coco has another crush. She has fallen head over heels for a certain neuro-opthalmologist who confirmed the 6th Nerve Palsy diagnosis and fitted Cheryl's glasses with a prism so she can actually see again!

Grandma Coco thinks she's the Big Cheese around here but it's really Cheryl who does the nitty-gritty stuff.....like drawing ....and that requires eyesight. Two weeks ago, Cheryl started seeing double. Oh, only a tiny bit for the far away stuff, at first. It wasn't too worrying. We thought maybe we were just a little tired. But then, the images got further apart and affected closer-up objects. Finally, it was so bad that the whole world was distorted and it made her dizzy and nauseated to look at it. Of course, as always happens, this occurred over the Canada Day weekend. We thought we'd just wait for the Monday morning and call our optometrist but we ended up in Emergency anyway at the Kingston General Hospital on the advice of the Telehealth Ontario phone line nurse.

For all those nay-sayers who criticize our health-care system here in Canada, Grandma Coco says "Put a sock in it!" That was not (and never has been) our experience. If you are having a crisis, you get seen right away....and we mean RIGHT AWAY. Once they eliminated the possibility that we were experiencing a stroke, we were seen next day in the emergency eye clinic. We didn't even know there was one but we are very greatful that there is. We had a CT scan with contrast dye that same day and they arranged for an MRI of our head and eyes on Friday. That's very fast! The neuro-opthalmologist was away but we saw him on Monday when he returned. For all of you who don't live in Canada, we don't want to brag but you should know this was all free of charge to us and everyone we saw was wonderful....caring and competent and patient. We are very lucky that the Kingdom of Coco has such a great arrangement with Health Canada. :) We wish everyone, everywhere had the same good fortune.

In celebration of the return of our sight (functional sight, if not yet completely normal sight) we point you toward this past Sunday's post on Underneath the Juniper Tree blog, where you will find a little poem that we wrote and illustrated BC (before the crisis). For a while there, we thought this might be the last we'd get to do. Looks like that won't be the case. Here's to better days ahead!