Abby's Lazy Eye

Many of you may know the my Abigail has a lazy eye. I have posted about it in the past.

You can usually see her lazy eye the when she is tired, not feeling well, or if she has just woken up. 

We are lucky she has an amazing eye doctor at Hopkins. He has actually followed her since her preemie days in the NICU.

Abigail never had ROP, but it did take a while for her eyes to become fully vascularized. 

Over the last two years we were instructed to try patching. Patching is when you cover the good eye so you are forced to use the weaker one. Well you can guess how well that went over with a young toddler. She wanted nothing to do with it. 

I can remember one time we had to have an appointment with another eye doctor because of a scheduling issue with her regular eye doctor. I told him we were having difficulty with patching because she would rip it off as soon as I put it on her. The doctor actually told me to put swim floats on her arms so she couldn't reach up and rip the patch off. Let's just say I was done with that doctor after that. Did he really think a toddler would sit there with floaties on and not protest?!

The last time we saw her eye doctor he saId that we could try eye drops instead of the patch.  The eye drops basically cause your eye to be blurry and it'll last all day. You put the drops in the stronger eye so you are forced to use the weaker one. If we do the eye drops, then we only have to do it twice a week. The eye patch is an every day event.

I have to admit I really hated the idea of doing the eye drops, but I knew we needed to do it. It's one of those things as a parent you just know you have to do, even though you feel so sad about doing it.  I really dreaded it.

 Now that we got her thrush under control I thought it was time to try the drops out. Again I was really dreading it.  

Sunday was our first go at it. I was anticipating a miserable day with lots of fussing, but I am happy to report she didn't mind it at all. She was only upset when I put the drops in, but didn't mention anything about her eye the rest of the day. This is a big stress relief for me!  We will now be doing the drops twice a week. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress.