#275 Eyes

When Eric was in preschool his teacher noticed that he rubbed his eyes a lot and seemed to have trouble seeing when she read stories to the class. After a trip to the eye doctor my parents found out that Eric needed glasses and that the vision in one eye wasn’t as good as in the other so he needed to wear a patch. If you look closely in the picture of him and me as kids, you can see the patch. After what seemed like years of patching, his eyesight did equalize and he just had to wear glasses or contacts.




At about 18 months of life, my husband started wearing glasses because he has an eye that turns in without them. With the glasses his eyes are perfectly straight.



With this family history and my profession, my kids get their eyes checked early and sometimes often. My oldest child has always measured normal for age with his eyes. My youngest has been borderline. Right before we left Oklahoma I had him seen by my mentor, a pediatric and neuro-ophthalmologist and he was VERY far-sighted for his age. His vision was still good and equal (as much as you can measure in a 9 month old) but it was something to watch. Since then the far-sightedness has been decreasing as it should, but when I took the boys in last week for their routine appointment, his left eye didn’t seem to be seeing as well as the right. It was late in the day and the appointment was long and the boys were tired, but we still couldn’t get him to read quite as well with the left eye as the right and there was a small prescription difference between the eyes. The difference shouldn’t have been enough to cause a problem, but well, you never know.



Tomorrow morning I’m going to bring him back in to have his left eye checked again. We’re going first thing in the morning when he shouldn’t be tired and he won’t need to be dilated so the appointment will be much shorter. Hopefully the left eye will test out as well as the right and we won’t need to worry about it. Worst case, he’ll need glasses which isn’t THAT big a deal as Eric and my husband could attest to. Still, I don’t want to have to try and make a four year old who sees perfectly with one eye keep glasses on his face. Oh well, I’ll do what I have to do as my parents did when they struggled with Eric to get him to keep the patch on.



This is one legacy I hope he didn’t pass on.