Vision Follow-Up

Yesterday, it was back to the opthamologist for my little girl. We determined at her first visit that she was using her left eye almost exclusively and her right eye had begun to drift in a state eye doctors call strabismus. The opthamologist prescribed some eye patches that my little one had to wear over her good eye for four hours each day.

The changes were dramatic. Her lazy eye perked up and started tracking much better. At yesterdays' appointment, the doctor said she is now using both eyes again. The issue now is that she is using them independently. She doesn't have the binocular vision she had before this all started.

That means surgery. In order to get my daughter's brain using both eyes in tandem again, we'll be taking her in for a minor eye surgery where the doctor will move the muscles in her eye a few millimeters in order to adjust their alignment. The hope is that this adjustment will jog her brain into using them normally again. The procedure has about an 80% chance of success since she had normal vision for about two years before developing problems. He said if she had only had normal vision for six or nine months the prognosis wouldn't have been as good.

My concern is that a very high percentage of 1p36 deletion kids, whose pictures I've seen, seem to have an eye alignment problem. Could it be that their brains have difficulty with binocular vision? It's hard to say because the brain cells that control the eyes haven't really even been mapped out yet.

I'm just grateful that my little one just needs a minor out patient tune up instead of some major open heart surgery. Hopefully she'll be seeing in stereo again soon!