“I thought she was just like me…” said Ethan, “clumsy.” She was only five and running into corners and the edges of doorways. Ethan didn’t think much of it because toddlers, by nature, are clumsy beings.
One afternoon Sarah, Hadley’s mom, was looking through the digital graveyard of family photos to send a few gems to Grandma when she noticed something odd. Every picture of Hadley showed a right eye squint. The lighting conditions were different, the angles changed, there was flash, there was no flash, but there was always that right eye squint.
“It was at her five year old check-up that the nurse was conducting a standard vision exam and discovered Hadley wasn’t recognizing the letters she was being shown. [The nurse] switched from the alphabet to images and found the same issue. She recommended we take her to see an eye doctor. We were very fortunate to find an eye doctor with experience withamblyopia.”
Amblyopia is a condition where one eye is weaker than the other, commonly referred to as a “lazy eye”. Sometimes this may be caused by a condition known as strabismus. Strabismus is caused when the eyes are not properly aligned due to muscle problems, issues with the nerves, or the brain.
When a muscle issue occurs that causes the eyes to become misaligned an adult isgenerally aware because he/she has a harder time suppressing one of the eyes and will see two images. Children, on the other hand, are expert adapters. Rather than deal with two images the brain may simply begin ignoring the signal coming from one of the eyes. In Hadley’s case her brain opted to ignore her right eye. The images coming from her right eye continued to blur. If caught too late, the brain may never learn to interpret messages from the amblyopic eye and vision can be lost.
Because Hadley never complained of two images and because there was no physical manifestation of any problem (no crossing of her eyes) the issue went unnoticed until a mother’s intuition and a nurse’s nice catch sent the family to a local Ophthalmologist.
“He diagnosed the problem immediately,” said Ethan, “and put us on the proper therapeutic road. We started with dilation drops [in the left eye to blur the vision coming from the stronger eye], but found that Hadley was sensitive to the side effects.” Hadley was switched to the patching method whereby the stronger eye is occluded with a patch forcing the amblyopiceye to work harder. The upside was that Hadley was able to play “Pirate”. “We found many helpful resources online, including a website that sells colorful eye-patches and children’s books about her condition,” remarks Ethan.
Today Hadley is eleven and no longer considered amblyopic in her right eye. She is encouraged to exercise her right eye to maintain good vision. “It could have been completely different,” says Ethan. “Looking back I realize she had poor stereo vision from the weakness in the right eye. Come to think of it, she never seemed to care much for those 3D movies we took her to. I just thought, ‘not only is she clumsy, like me, but she is just as hard to impress.’”
Don’t wait if you believe there may be a problem. Come by if you or your child needs a vision screening. We care, you’ll see.--COA
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