His Little Eyes

My youngest son will be seven in a few weeks. Since he was around 14 months old he has been wearing glasses. He has Strabismus, meaning he is cross eyed in both eyes. He is far sided, had an astigmatism in both eyes. He is red/green color blind, and has no depth perception, meaning he can not see in 3d and can only see in the direction he is looking. He also has Amblyopia. That is where his brain is ignoring one of his eyes and only focuses on his right eye.

For the astigmatism and the farsidedness he wearing glasses that change about every six months in strength. For the Strabismus he has had botox injections in both eyes, and then finally eye muscle surgery. For this they had to remove his eye muscles and reattach them so that they were aligned. Although they could slip again at any time, his eyes have remained straight since then. It has been two and a half years since the surgery. Depth perception develops at around six months of age with straight eyes. With his eyes being crossed at the time, he did not develop it and never will. You only have one shot at that and he missed the boat.

As for the red/green color blindness, there is really nothing we can do about this either. He sees color, but not in the same way we do. He has learned with repetition that we call red, but what we see as red he sees as green. All of the colors look different. Everything is dull an he can not see different shades of colors. Fortunately he was born with this so does not know any different.

Now as for the Amblyopia....we have been doing patch therapy. We put a patch over his good eye for a few hours at a time to force him to use the bad eye. The hope is that if we do this for long enough we can retrain his brain to use that eye as well as the other. We have been patching for six years now, with no luck. This last appointment I finally asked the doctor if we were going to fix this problem. He told me that it is possible, but more often than not, no. He said that eventually we would give up on that eye and stop patching. This will happen in a few years. At that point the eye will continue to get worse until he goes blind in that eye.

This has hit me so hard. I keep thinking about his life and what this will mean for it. Will he be able to drive? What kinds of jobs will he not be able to do? Will this be a disability? There are already things now that he can not d, like sports. I just can not believe how many problems his little eyes can have at once.

One good thing did come from his last visit. The doctor turned me on to a website that makes cloth patches! They slip on right over his glasses and we can reuse them over and over. No more sticky bandaid like patched that hurt his face! I am so excited, and so is he. It is Amblyopia Awareness month! Help spread the word about the disease and help to stop the stares! If you use patches or have a child that uses them you should check this site out!

www.patchpals.com