Thursday, July 9, 2009

More On Rachel

I may be over-reacting and I think I may be wrong on the glasses thing, because she displays no signs of sight loss. Although it took her a long time to learn the colors, she picks them out with no problems now. I have limited experience with this in that my friend Meagan's daughter has glaucoma, a cataract and therefore lazy eye and she's had to patch Savannah. Savannah, to me, showed signs of sight loss: bumping into things and using her hands in ways I never saw my own kids do. I don't see Rachel doing any of the things that I saw Savannah do. But then again, Savannah doesn't wear glasses either. I don't know much of anything about this and if you read the info on lazy eye that I linked to yesterday, you know as much as me. I need to stop making my own diagnosis and just try to forget about it until we can get in to the doctor. I did want to post a picture for you so you can see what it is that makes us concerned.

It's hard to get a picture since it's so fleeting. This morning Dad and I were looking at pictures from May with the girls and we came across this one. If you zoom up on her face you can see distinctly that her right eye is doing something funny.

But oh.my.goodness. Isn't she cute!!! The one thing I do know for sure is that if we don't get to it right now, her brain will stop using that eye, therefore it is imperative to fix it now.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It does look like lazy eye. My dh had problems with that as a kid. He is ok now :)

She is adorable. I have to say I think all your kids are adorable though ;)

Unknown said...

Yeah, I can see it too. Be sure to update the blog on what happens at the appointment!

Johanna said...

I can see it in the picture. I had a cousin with lazy eye and she had some treatments for it when she was young. I couldn't tell you what though, so that information isn't very helpful afterall...

M said...

but patching does work up to age 8, so don't get too hasty

M said...

well, the need for correction is what lazy eye is, basically it is an inbalance of the eyesight, which causes the brain to favor one eye over the other. When the brain favors the one eye, it shuts off the input from the weaker eye and only uses the info brought in by the good eye. Therefore, patching the strong eye forces the brain to use the weak eye and strengthens the conection between the eye and the brain. by the age of 8, the connections formed between the eye and the brain at set, there is little more that can be done through patching.

There are some types of lazy eye that are surgically fixed. I believe these are ones where the eye is not aligned correctly which causes the eye to act like it wanders. Those are corrected under anesthesia by shortening the tendon or muscle that is too long, then fine tuning it with patching.

Joanna said...

Interesting. I'm so anxious for the appt. to find out what's going on.