Eye Updates

For those coming into the blog late, let me back up a bit.  2 years ago, a casual, quick vision test at home revealed that Isaac, now 10 year old, could hardly see anything in his left eye.  We quickly arranged an eye test and we found he had amblyopia. This is a condition where a child has an eye that isn't seeing well, and at some point the brain decides that the data from that eye isn't worth collecting so it stops using the eye.

So Isaac had perfect vision in his right eye, and his left eye was terrible, about 20/200 on the chart.

We saw 2 opthalmologists and settled quickly on a female doctor who works 30 minutes from us. That's a long way, but we really clicked with her so we started seeing her.

At the age of 8, the prognosis was not good for Isaac.  By that time, it was possible we had gone too long for his left eye to improve much, even with treatment.  But we prayed, he got glasses with a strong lens to help his weak eye, and he started PATCHING.

Patching meant that for 8 hours a day, Isaac covered his good eye to force his bad eye to work.  Now, that obviously doesn't sound like a ton of fun because he was forced to do everything with his nearly blind eye.  It would be like going from perfect vision (because the good eye is really good) to being partially blind 8 hours a day.

Anyone who knows our son Isaac will know that he is not the most compliant child in the world. He is strong willed, wonderful, and...sometimes difficult. I was really dreading how patching would go as some kids strongly resist, pull off the patch, and basically don't cooperate.

Well, it went like a dream.  I think he was the world's best amblyopia patient.  He quickly learned to put on his own patch every morning, and he even kept track of exactly how long he needed to wear it. (Wearing the patch 24 hours would be bad as then his GOOD eye might deteriorate.)

And he improved very rapidly.  Over the course of 18 months or so, his bad eye improved from 20/200 to about 20/40 (with glasses.)  That was it, he didn't get any better, but we were very happy to achieve that!

One other big improvement was in his depth perception. When he was first diagnosed, he had a depth perception of zero.  With one blind eye, he wasn't getting 2 slightly different views of the world so he lost all depth perception. Over 18 months of patching, he improved dramatically with his depth perception.  The test they use involves looking at circles with 4 dots at 90 degree intervals on each circle.  On each circle, one dot is out of the page a bit (using a hologram method or something).  The first circle is easy to see, but numbers 7, 8, and 9 are pretty hard to see.  By the end of patching, he was able to detect the 3-D aspect of 1 through 6.

On Monday, we went to the opthalmologist to see how his left eye was holding up as we've not done patching for 6 months.  To the doctor's surprise, and mine, Isaac saw ALL NINE of the raised dots in the depth perception test.  As she said, "How did he DO that."  We are so pleased!  And his left eye is holding steady.

Angela, who is far sighted, maintained a stable prescription so that is good news.

I made a somewhat emergency appointment for Daniel and the doctor checked him as well.  Sarah, our 2 year old, is very farsighted and has been in glasses since she was 10 months old.  I noticed that Daniel is crossing his eyes at times, which I know from my experience with Sarah is a bad sign. The doctor confirmed that our little man is not focusing well and yes, needs to be in glasses.  That's kind of a pain because babies don't like glasses, and he is going to chew on them, throw them, etc.  We'll be hunting for glasses frequently.  But we need to give him at least a few hours a day with good vision to decrease the risk of amblyopia and eye crossing.  And I'm thankfu we caught it, and have vision insurance for glasses.