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Lazy Eye

1K views 9 replies 9 participants last post by  sbgrace 
#1 ·
I feel like this isn't really a special needs situation but thought maybe someone who knows more about this might see it in this section.

My 6 yo DD was diagnosed today with a lazy eye and farsightedness. She is being fitted for glasses. I wear glasses too so I expected one of my children to need them too. I don't know anything about lazy eye though. So I was doing some internet reading and now have myself stressed that she needs an eye patch or vision therapy. I am sure I must be over reacting, my eye Dr said nothing about any of these things.

So if you or your child has been diagnosed w/ a lazy eye, what treatments did you have to go through. Is it possible that her problem is minimal and the glasses is all she needs for corrections, or should I talk to another dr about this problem. I don't want to scare my DD especially since she is already worried about getting the glasses (even though they look absolutely adorable on her), and I don't want her to be traumatized w/ therapy she doesn't need, but of course if she needs it I want to be sure she gets it.

So help calm my concerns and help me understand. Thank you!
 
#2 ·
Well, I think you need to see a pediatric opthamologist--and that specifically. That person will tell you if you need to do anything else. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. That person will know.
The issue (as I'm sure you've read) is that untreated lazy eye can affect vision. Sometimes a child can appear to have issues with muscles in eyes but really they don't. Only a pediatric opthamologist could be trusted to know what you're dealing with. I know that's probably not exactly what you hoped to hear.
 
#4 ·
We see a pediatric opthamalogist. My son started wearing glass at five with checkups every two months - after about 14 months his vision started to go downhill so we started to patch 3 hrs/day. It has been 8 months and his vision has improved but we're still patching to get his lazy eye to optimal functioning as quickly as possible.

About six months after my son was seen, I took my daughter in - her vision was fine. We went back at the one year point for a follow-up and it had gotten worse so she started with glasses. At the two month checkup after the glasses, it had tanked so she's getting patched now and is being seen every six weeks. It has stabilized. She's only wearing it for 3 hrs/day as well.

Definitely, definitely see a pediatric opthamalogist. My nephew has the same issue and has been in glasses for 3 years and has never had to have a patch and his lazy eye has resolved and he just wears them for farsightedness - same ped. optha that my kids see.
 
#5 ·
Hi, not a SN's parent, but saw this post and had to respond. I had lazy eye as a baby. I also have other vision problems. I'm near sighted and have a very high astigmatism. What my eye doctor did for me was give me two surgeries where he shortened the muscle, I think. I was 3 & 5 at the time of the surgeries so I don't remember a lot about it.

I have worn glasses my whole life.

Anyway, my lazy eye was corrected (though my eye dr's do keep close tabs on it just in case anything ever needs to be done again). I'm not saying this to try to worry you and I'm not saying that your dd will need surgery. Times have changed a lot and so has technology and such. What I'm just trying to say is, as severe as mine was, I'm perfectly fine now. Yes, I'll wear glasses my entire life, but not because of the lazy eye.

My younger brother had a very slight lazy eye. Glasses were basically all he needed, though he did do eye exercises often. He's just fine as far as I know.

I agree with the pp's. Go see a pediatric opthamologist and get another opinon.

Try not to stress too much. Lazy eye isn't a horrible thing. It's perfectly treatable.
 
#6 ·
My husband had a lazy eye. He is in his late forties and I'm sure things have changed but he had surgery and wore glasses for a short time. He's never had problems since and didn't need glasses until age 43 - age not the lazy eye.

We thought our daughter had a lazy eye but she was fine. The shape of her eyes and the skin around her eye just made it look as though she had a lazy eye. As she got older it appeared normal just as the ped opthamalogist said it would.
 
#7 ·
My dd has accommodative esotropia. Eye stuff is very complicated and hard to understand. It was hard for me, as a midwife, to just put her treatment into a dr's hands and trust him without totally understanding what her exact issue is and exactly how the treatment will work. I'm so used to never trusting most doctors and thinking they just go around messing things up most of the time! But in the end that's what I had to do, because the more I tried to teach myself about eye stuff, the less I felt I understood. It helped that he was a top pediatric ophthalmologist and had a wonderful manner about him that put all of us at ease. My dd started wearing glasses at the age of 3 and will wear them until at least the age of about 12 if not her entire life. Just the glasses will probably be enough to treat her successfully without any patching or surgery. We pay out of pocket for our medical needs and seeing a ped. ophth. is on the spendy side but he did give us a cash-pay discount. Definitely worth it. I would NOT leave it up to an optometrist or any other kind of specialist. You need a treatment plan, and that will affect her prescription.
 
#8 ·
I had big issues with Pediatric opthamologists when I was little.

I have what I can only conclude is Neurologically sourced strabismus (since I have a great deal of conscious control over it, and it happens more often when I am stressed or actively tracking 2 seperate objects, one with each eye). I am not sure that the average opthamologist even knows or even considers that a strabismus can be neurologically caused, because they absolutly always (in my experience) assume it is physical or at least blindly follow a physical correction route.

For instance, patching is for when your dominant eye is so over-utilized that your secondary eye becomes slow and weak, and can often become blurred as a result of partial atrophy. If the optho had askd me ANY questions when I was a kid, I never would have gone through SIX MONTHS of useless patching. My eyes and my strabismus would very clearly not be helped by patching, because I switch dominant eyes consciously and often, I have no loss of movement and no atrophy in either eye... I wonder how they even came to the conclusion of which eye to patch... since neither eye is slow or under-utilized, they just don't work together.

Then came the barrage of prism glasses. These are basically supposed to be fitted to make it so that it is uncomfortable for your "lazy" eye to be out of sync with your dominant one. It is impossible to size/fit/formulate them if you have no dominant eye... They punnish you with splitting impossible headaches if you do not keep your lazy eye in sync with your dominant one... if you have no regular dominant eye, they are just really painful all the time.

Now all that being said, I am pretty sure what I have is very uncommon, and that if you think your child has a "lazy eye" that is most likely correct, and patching/prism/surgery will most likely fix it. I am just trying to give you an example of why I think you should read as much as possible about it before you go to the ped optho, because more than likely he/she will suggest the most common treatment path regardless of what is actually going on with your child... It is kind of up to you to notice what the actual problem is, because in my experience, nobody else is going to do that.
 
#9 ·
my daughter has lazy eye and she had vision therapy for about 7 months. Don't let the idea of vision "therapy" scare you off--it was so much fun for her (when done correctly, it's fun...the home-work was tedious, but it was just her and me for that) she did vision therapy 2-3 times a week.

Here's out history:

We initially took her to an opthamologist who gave her a patch she was supposed to wear for 3 hours a day on her strong eye in order to strengthen her weak eye. If that didn't work, he was going to suggest surgery to correct it. We did the patch thing and her eye was WAY worse after 3 months and he said to get her into surgery.

As I did research, I found that the success rate with vision therapy is substantially higher than surgery and that with surgery, then can tend to overcorrect and a child's eye that float out will now float in and you just have the opposite problem.

I researched vision therapy and found the excel institute right in my own backyard. www.excelinstitute.com and she made wonderful progress. I happened to be enrolling my daughter this year in a charter school that has it's own vision therapy program in the school with their own doctor and therapists (yay! I don't have to pay for it anymore!)...

I went back to my daughter's ophtamologist and asked why he never bothered to tell me about vision therapy and he said that once you stop therapy a child MIGHT regress and you'd have to start over again (Great idea, so let's just not give this information to a mother and tell her surgery is her daughters only option


also, when we started therapy with dd, we were told that the patch tip would have done absolutely nothing for my daughter (besides drive her and us crazy)...the only time we used the patch was for a specific eye exercise.

I tend to mix up my doctor lables, but what I've also learned is that opthamologists are surgery-happy and not very holistic in their care. Optometrists will opt for a holistic approach. Also, not everyone believes it is a muscle issue. Some believe the floating eye is a brain processing issue and when the brain isn't receiving information from one source, it will "turn it off" in order to not see double..hence, the eye starts to float out. An opthamologist will deny this....you'd have to listen to both sides of the story straight from the horses mouth, to come up with your own believe system.

if you have any questions, you can pm me.
sarah
 
#10 ·
Do get it checked out; as someone else mentioned and I alluded to--sometimes it is just the eye spacing and not true lazy eye. We had that too. The pediatrician was concerned. The pediatric opthamalogist explained that it wasn't actual lazy eye-it just appeared to be. In his case it was the spacing of his eyes and also maybe sensory stuff according to the ped. opthamalogist. We didn't need to treat. They do know their stuff.
 
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