My son Jaxon is almost 5 years old. We noticed something was going on with his eyes just shortly after his 1st birthday. I recall looking through photos from his birthday party and noticing that the red reflex (red eye) existed in just one of his eyes. The other eye did not have “red eye” from the camera flash. I thought that was a little odd. At that point every now and then when he would look at me I couldn’t quite tell if he was look at me or past me. We then made an appointment to have his eyes checked. Turns out Jaxon has both strabismus and amblyopia in his right eye. We went to his eye doctor regularly and Jaxon screamed and screamed at every appointment for nearly 2 years. The doctor and her assistant were so kind and helpful and really did their best to work with him and try to measure his eye turn but invariably after 5 or 10 minutes it would turn into a cry/scream fest. I’m sure it has nothing to do with his redhead temperament.
After a couple years, something clicked with him. He decided he really liked his doctor and her assistant, began to cooperate with all the testing games and sat really well in the examination chair all by himself. It was determined that his eye turn was not accommodative, that he would need surgical correction to align his eyes. For a year and a half of those years between detection and surgery, Jaxon patched his strong eye EVERY HOUR of the day except for just one hour before bedtime. I am amazed to this day about how cooperative he has and continues to be with the daily patching of his eye each.
In January of this year, Jaxon had surgery on both eyes to align them and hopefully begin to use them together. Although he did not open his eyes for 11 hours after surgery, once he realized he could open them and see just fine he was back to his regular energetic self the very next day. We made it through the post-op eye ointment applications and have been able to reduce the daily patching to just one hour a day.
We continue to hope on a daily basis that the correction will “take” on this first round of surgery and that his eyes will work together at this point. So far, he is still too young to communicate with us what he is seeing. His vision remains stable since surgery with the decreased patching which leads us to think that maybe, possibly, just hopefully those eyes are working together. Whatever the final result from surgery may be, we are confident that all the hard work and occasional tears and battles to patch will lead to the best possible vision for our son.
