When Drew was very young I noticed he went cross-eyed a lot and
it drove me nutts. In vanity, I told the Doctor, whom I thought would tell me
'it's nothing, stop being silly' but instead she said 'why don't you make an
appointment to see the pediatric optometrist'. So just before he turned 3
months I took him in. Sitting in the waiting room I noticed many children with
very obvious and serious vision issues and I started to feel silly. Then
we saw the Doctor and I learned three new terms 1. ocular albinism 2. pendular
nystagmus and 3. intermittent strabismus.
I laughed out loud. "Excuse me? Albinism as in ALBINO? I'm
confused." I mean Drew is fair skinned but Albino? Turns out albinism is a
spectrum. Drew had blue eyes that turned to hazel so I did not understand, it
was not like he had red eyes. But it's about the strength of the pigment. From
NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypo-pigmentation):
With ocular albinism, the color of
the iris of the eye may vary from blue to green or even brown, and sometimes
darkens with age. However, when an eye doctor examines the eye by shining a
light from the side of the eye, the light shines back through the iris since
very little pigment is present.
The strangest part is that it's inherited. 2 months later the
whole family came back in to be tested and neither Jason or I are carries so he
declared it a mutation (or he's not our kid). Jordan did not show any signs
either even though he has blue eyes which is a recessive gene that eked it's
way through.
The pendular nystagmus was his eyes moving
rapidly back and forth. He did it a lot when he was nursing or really
concentrating so it was fairly bad when he was young, but now, at 8 months we
rarely see it and the Doctor is no longer worried about it and thinks it will
go away entirely.
Intermittent strabismus (lazy eye) was
that his right eye turned in and gave him the look of being cross-eyed. It was
'intermittent' because it was not all the time and seemed to be getting less
and less. Then around 6 months it seemed to worsen. In fact, I started to think
that the right eye couldn't turn out at all. The Doctor told me to call him if I had noticed changes so back we
went. And I'm glad we did because it turns out it needs to be addressed now but
is completely correctable. For six weeks we patch his good eye for 2 hours
a day to strengthen the weak eye. If after 6 weeks there is no difference, Drew
will have surgery to adjust the eye so that the brain does not start to ignore
it.
The surgery will have nothing to do with the fact that he has
albinism which comes with poor eyesight so he was also prescribed a pair of
glasses. I thought peach would be skin color-ed and blend in but Jay thinks I
got him pink glasses. Oh well, it's pretty darn hilarious and cute regardless.
So far he doesn't mind them and still seems like his happy self - rolling with
whatever life or Jordan throws at him.
No comments:
Post a Comment