When I went back to work when Daniel was 7 months old, I started working part-time and Peter more or less full-time, instead of both of us juggling full-but-flexi-time. In general this has helped to ease the load for both of us. We no longer routinely have to sit down, exhausted, to work every evening after the kids are in bed. Even though my work situation is far from ideal, I actually resent it a whole lot less now that it takes me away from my kids less and eats into the rest of my life less.

Often I think I have a much better deal than Peter, as every lunchtime I can (theoretically, anyway) just breeze out of the office, home to enjoy things with the kids (they get out of school at mid-day so there's lots of day left to enjoy). However, there are weeks, like this one so far, which are totally draining, and the thought of being ensconced at work for the day is frankly quite appealing.

On about Thursday last week, I started noticing something unsettling about Daniel's left eye. It was the sort of occasion when first you think you've seen something, and then you think you must have been imagining it.

(When Lauren was a baby, we were a bit worried, and eventually took her to the paediatrician, and then the opthalmologist, for a possible squint. It turned out to be a false squint, in which the eyes appear squint because of a slight and temporary assymetry in the baby's still-forming facial structure. So we've always been quite pleased that Daniel had no evidence of any such thing.)

However by the weekend there was no denying that something was not quite right. Sometimes he looked fine, at other times he looked squint. Peter got all technical and got busy with digital photos and drawing programs to plot lines on Daniel's face. We tested how he moved his eyes after a moving object, and clearly saw how his left eye was actually not moving left of center at all.

Freak-out time.

His left eye looked dreadful when he looked to the left. It almost looked inanimate.

This worrying weekend was followed by two hectic afternoons of doctor visits, specialist visits, and hunting down things at pharmacies. The short story is that he's probably got some sort of virus in the muscle and it will probably resolve itself in about four to six weeks. There's no damage to the optic nerves or retina. However there is also a scarier option if it's not a virus. If it's not better in six weeks he will have an MRI scan to see if it's related to something in his brain. The doctor said that he has seen Daniel's symptoms before (not tremendously often though) and sometimes the parents are so worried that they do the scan straight away.

But the scan might need an anaesthetic if sedation is not enough, which is not a great option for a nine-month old.

So. We're just waiting.

He has to have an eye patch on his good eye half of each day so that vision in the bad eye is not permanently damaged from lack of use of that eye, and we have to go back for weekly visits to the doctor to monitor things.

I have gone into an adrenalin-induced frenzy of administrative activity to try and take my mind off it, and have been doing all kinds of things from phoning plumbers to booking appointments to having applicances repaired.

I can't help feeling somehow responsible.

And I keep noticing the way people look at Daniel differently.