Experience with eye turns

[~clover~]

Did your DS ever use patches to try to strengthen the muscles in the eye that turns? Sil had the same problem & so did a friends dd. Both used patches over the good eye at around 2. For quite a while. Pretty sure sil was still using patches when I met her at 7. Just for a few hours here & there.

A friends dd had surgery to fix hers, but she was just a few months old. Maybe they prefer to do it at a young age?

Sorry, I have no personal experience, so I'm not much help.

[Trillian]

In some cases, the muscle of the eye is so strong that it will only ever be able to be corrected to a certain point and then it won't get any better than that. My eldest child had a turned eye from about 10mths old and it was a result of being severely long sighted (probably from birth we've been told) and his eye turned so he was able to focus on fine motor skills (such as being able to see to screw a lid on a bottle etc). We saw a paed opthamologist when he was 5 and he was prescribed some pretty strong glasses and a patching regime for nearly 2 years. He had to wear a patch for 2 hours a day and 3-4 hours on weekends to strengthen the muscle in his eye as well as visual exercises which was really successful and the turn is gone. The opthamologist said that if it was more extreme, then surgery would be an option but he said we were lucky in that patching and glasses would be enough. Now at 13 his eyesight is pretty good considering -he can go for short periods of time when playing sport where he doesn't need his glasses though he is still long sighted and lasic surgery is an option in the future.

Whether or not the surgery is offered as an option would depend on a few things I'd say. DH's nephew has recently had the surgery done as his turned eye was bad enough that he had trouble seeing and was constantly tripping over and running into things. Close friends of ours have a DD who had a shocking turned eye and had her first surgery at 3, her second at about 8 and then one last year at 15. Each surgery has failed and the muscle pulls itself back to it's 'default' position. It's been advised that she doesn't have any more surgery because the risk of failure is too high as well as further damage to the muscle apparently so her eye is permanently turned. If the muscle is too strong, it will just keep pulling back and fail, so maybe they think this is a possibility of happening to your DS so they aren't offering it because he's not a good candidate for the surgery and they dont' want to put him through it if it's not going to work. If the turn hasn't been corrected after 2 years, it might be likely that it's not ever going to be corrected. I'd be asking them specifically why they aren't recommending that he has surgery and if you aren't happy, get a second opinion. But you have to be prepared that this might be something they can't fix.