Cataract

October seventh is the day doctors discovered a congenital cataract in our Lucy's right eye. Turns out it can cause complete and permanent blindness in that eye!

When vision is obscured in our developmental years the brain actually turns off sight in that eye. Even if the eye is fixed later in life the brain continues to reject that eye and persist in blindness. Basically, you're totally blind, permanently. In essence all the neural connection associated with the weak eye were trimmed away making vision impossible.

Cataract means clouded lens. If you look closely (click on the picture), you can actually see a small smudge in the right pupil. A portion of the cataract is opaque surrounded by what they call scattering.

Doctors have had us patch her strong eye in order to force her to use the weak one as well as possible. This weekend when we visited Seattle Children's Hospital for the second time the weak eye had improved a bit. Yay! Weirdly, now the other eye was almost totally blind! The doctors seemed really surprised that I was so vigilant with patching. Apparently, there is usually not good follow through on the parents part. They assured us that vision would return. Even yesterday I could see her starting to track more with that eye. Relief! Can you imagine, in only ten days time a baby will go blind if they do not see anything?! We are backing off to only patching half time for six weeks. A little piece of reassurance for me has been Proverbs 20:12 "The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the LORD has made them both."