Pirate Princess

It took almost two months to get Marley's pediatric ophthalmology appointment because there are only five in the entire Charlotte, N.C. area! We had that appointment on Sept. 7, which exactly one year back to the day, was Marley's fetal echocardiogram to ensure everything looked good with her heart following the devastating news of a brain anomaly.

It was an amazing appointment! We are so blessed. Marley's neurosurgeon spoke highly of our new ophthalmologist and has even performed surgeries with her in the past. When she began to assess Marley's eyes, she started speaking an entirely different language to her assistant which made me a little uneasy. As any hydro mom knows, foreign medical language is always a bit unsettling, at least until the dust clears and you're enlightened with a simplified translation. We've always known that Marley's eyes turn inwards, it's quite obvious, but we didn't know she has amblyopia, which is a fancy word for "lazy eye." Marley's inward turning eyes is called strabismus, but more specifially to her, esotropia. Right now we're to use a patch on Marley's left eye for two hours per day to make sure her right eye does some of the heavy work while she's awake. The good thing is that we're treating her super early. If it is caught late, people with amblyopia suffer permanent vision loss in the "bad eye."

This is most likely caused by her hydrocephalus, but so far, it's the only "concern" we've had, which is very small to say the least. Marley's ophthalmologist described her optic nerves as "absolutely beautiful." 

There are extremely cute patches available at http://www.ortopadusa.com/.