Glasses for Mr. Mr.

Since Walker was about four months old, we noticed that his vision  wasn't quite right. In fact, this is what alerted us to something wasn't developing correctly.  He was unable to track and really look into faces.  At first, I was hoping that he was just blind.  I know that sounds strange, but my gut told me there was more to it, but being blind would be the lesser of two evils.  A person can function quite "normally" in our world being blind.  The other was unknown.  So off we took him to an ophthalmologist. (Do you know the difference? click here.) But since he was so young and uncooperative, it was hard to diagnose him with anything in particular, besides, low vision.  She sent us for an MRI, which showed no major issues, she sent us for another test that put a contact lens and wires to a computer to make sure that there were not issues with the retina. Everything continued to come back normal.  The only diagnosis was strabismus, which to us common folk, is  a wandering eye.  So we were told to patch him and contact the National Blind Institute.

We continued to take her to him, while receiving vision services. My frustration was that since he couldn't tell us what he could or could not see, how can we be sure everything was "normal"?

Around Christmas time, we went to see old family friends, who also have a child with special needs.Through our conversations about our amazing children, I learned that they had recently taken their daughter to a low vision specialist. I had no idea this type of doctor existed! So we went home with a phone number and a lot of questions.

Tuesday we got into see Dr. Siwoff,(click here for his website) The initial exam took about two hours, he preformed the normal tests and concluded that the actually function of his eyes was fine.  The question then becomes where is the information being lost? This is his speciality.

After putting some electric wires to Walker's head, similar to an EEG, he then patched one eye and showed Walker a series of video pictures.  Simultaneously, he recorded the brain activity in coordination to the images.  Then he put on glasses with a prism lens and repeated the tests.  He did this for each eye. Right away it was obvious that Walker was attending more to the video with the glasses on.

The determination is that Walker is not receiving image information from the right side of his head.  The electric impulses showed less stimulation to the brain on that side, but did increase with the use of the glasses. The technology is new and is considered out of the box, but I clearly saw a difference in not only the computer print out, but in Walker's reaction.

Vision has a huge impact on ones development. I feel that anything we can do to help Walker see the world, and place himself in it is worth it! In eight weeks, we will get to try out the new glasses and see if that helps him!  I am very excited!!