Tuesday, August 22, 2006

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!

3 comments:

bella said...

Wow! I'm glad that there was significant improvement this quickly! And kudos to the doctors, for jumping on this so quickly, and making sure that your little one got the benefit of the patching, and the 'minor tune-up' right away!

Interesting thought on the brain not handling the binocular stuff. It would be fascinating to understand. I wonder, as well, if it might be contributed to by the general low muscle tone and the motor dysphagia? Its so hard, when you start trying to isolate things, isn't it??

Let us know when your little one heads in for the surgery, so we can keep her in our prayers!

--bella

bella said...

OH, and by the way, it looks like you were successful in migrating your blogs to beta! Congrats! I'm still flailing in the mess of trying to migrate; I set up a new account, and they didn't move my old stuff, only now I can't access the old things either. *sigh* (Luckily, it was only my writing blog that was affected, and I think someone said I could continue to post via email, until its all figured out. Luckily, as well, Tulips is hosted on my own server, with my own mess to deal with! LOL)

Anyway, congrats!

--bella

Nate said...

Hi Bella, thanks for your support as always. I hope your blogs get migrated over okay. This new version of "Google" Blogger is really pretty good. Uploads and posts are faster and since I don't really do anything fancy with my blog, it migrated easily. Good luck!