Doctors consider small changes to be stable

"Fighting " 12x16 painting by my blind 4 year old Jimmy

Jimmy is doing pretty good right now, We are just waiting for his next MRI the second week of December to see if whatever it is in his head is growing or not. If they grow then they are tumors if they don't grow then they are just scar tissue.

Doctors are interesting people, they consider a change of 20% or less to be "stable" so you could actually have a slow growing tumor be "stable" and think it is not growing when it is actually growing, just very slowly. That is why we always insist that the radiologist check his MRIs against several scans that we have done in the past, not just the most recent scans. Well it seems to be the same with Opthamologists. Jimmy went to Dr. Hoffman last week and we were told yet again that there was no change in his vision. When I asked specifically what his vision was he told us that he still can't see out of his right eye and his left eve is 20/125 with peripheral vision loss and limited color perception. his vision used to be 20/200 I asked him why he considered this no change. He said last time his vision was 20/150 and 20/125 is not really much different. Jimmy's vision has been slowly improving over the past 2 years but not enough to be considered a change when tested every 3 months. The good news is that his vision is slowly improving when we were told that it would probably never get any better. I'm rooting for those optic nerves to grow!