Off topic - Gideon's eyes

My posts this month have been about Childhood Cancer, but today I want to share sometime else.

On Friday we took Gideon for his eye Doctor appointment. He has been going every 3-4 months for the past 4 years, having vision therapy for the last 4 years, and wearing glasses for the past 6 years!

When Gideon was 4 we noticed that he turned his head to the side to look at things and that one eye drifted. We took him to the eye Doctor and he was given glasses. It took no time at all for him to get used to them because he could see and he loved that!

When we moved to Georgia in 2009, we knew he probably needed new glasses since he was not liking the pair he had anymore. We took him to a local Optometrist who referred him to a Specialist in Savannah. It was there that Gideon was diagnosed with Amblyopia, commonly referred to as "lazy eye". At this point, Gideon was 6 years old and it is commonly assumed that the problem can no longer be corrected after 6 years old. However, the Specialist did not feel this was true and so we began "patching" to try and correct Gideon's vision.

We used patches that covered his "good" eye  like a bandaid, to force the "lazy" eye to work harder and correct itself. After a while we also used eye drops in his "good" eye that made his vision blurry in that eye, which accomplished the same thing as patching, but worked for longer periods of time. With the actual patches we often had the problem of them coming off before they were supposed to. For instance, if he was supposed to wear a patch for 3 hours one day, it might start peeling off if he were running around outside getting sweaty. Of course we could just put another one on, but that was expensive.

His vision slowly improved over the years, he changed prescriptions several times and as of June this year his vision had improved from the original 20/100 to 20/20! Well, almost 20/20, his left eye is still slightly dominant but its close enough.

At our visit to the Specialist on Friday Gideon got great news, his vision is now stable without therapy and he doesn't have to go back for a check up for a whole year!!! He was very glad to hear this and so was I. He will likely always need to wear glasses (the 20/20 is with glasses on), but that's OK, lots of people wear glasses!