I don’t ever use my blog as a place for my personal life and personal views. To me my blog is photography related and I love to share my photography here with you. HOWEVER, I am aware that I am lucky enough to have a a lot of readers and so have a large captive audience if I ever choose to stand on a soap box. Don’t be afraid, I still have no intention of soap box preaching to you all. LOL!
I do have something non photography related I wanted to share with you though. I thought perhaps it might help someone out there if I let you know a bit about my youngest son and the problems we have had with his vision.
Two years ago, my then 5, almost 6 year old son told me that he had a “seeing eye” and a “not seeing eye”. While I had taken my older 3 children to the eye doctor I had never taken him as his vision had always seemed fine. He was learning to read on schedule and had never once given us a reason to believe that his vision was less than perfect like the rest of our family ( since then 3 of us have ended up wearing glasses, including me). I just thought I would take him “someday” and that would be fine. If he needed glasses eventually I would find out, and for now he certainly seemed like his vision was just fine.
When I took him to the doctor we were devastated to discover that he not only had a severe vision problem, he had a lazy eye. Up to that point in my life I had ignorantly thought that a lazy eye was an eye that wandered, something I would have definitely noticed. If you thought the same, then this post is for you.
While I am not an eye doctor this is what I understand a lazy eye to be…
A lazy eye is when one of the eyes is not seeing the same picture as the other, either because yes, the eye is wandering, or because ( as is the case with my son), because the vision in one eye is so bad that the brain can’t make sense of the picture that it sees. When that happens the brain has to shut off the picture from one of the eyes, and sees only through the other eye. The eye that is left is ignored and gradually the optic nerve atrophies and if left long enough vision will never be regained in that eye. A person with a lazy eye can see a very blurry, out of focus picture with the bad eye, but putting the correct prescription of glasses in front of their eye will never fix their vision.
If discovered early enough the problem can be corrected most likely to completely normal vision. If left too long the best that can be hoped for is a mild improvement if any. The problem here is, that 5 almost 6 like my son, is actually TOO LATE. We can hope for some mild improvement so that he would not be legally blind if something happened to his other eye, but that is all at this point. The problem is best discovered and fixed when the child is very, very young. That is why it is important to take kids in to have their eyes checked when they are little. I believe the age that is recommended to begin eye exams is 9 months old.
I can’t tell you how much a wish I had taken my son in sooner. His vision problem will be with him his whole life, just because as his mother I dropped the ball and failed to take him into get his vision checked. I feel so guilty.
Another thing to know about lazy eyes is that they are usually inherited. When the eye doctor told me about my son’s vision problem he asked me who in our family also had a lazy eye. I said no one, and he told me to ask around. I did, and found out that my mother in law has a lazy eye also.
I just wanted to share this personal story because I know how easy it is to put off having eye exams when your child has no apparent vision problems. I hope that our story helps someone out there.
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