Anterior Segment Dysgenesis

Yesterday I wrote about the current situation with my daughter’s eyes and the state of her vision.   I realized when I went to bed that I’d forgotten one.   To explain, let me go back in time.   When my daughter had her three-year-old wellness checkup she failed her eye exam.   We weren’t particularly concerned because she wasn’t that interested in looking at the pictures on the wall or answering the questions from the nurse.   Later in the year, our school was visited by the Prevent Blindness group from our state.   She failed their test as well, so we decided to have her evaluated by an eye doctor.

It took a few months to get in to see the highly recommended doctor we selected, but we weren’t overly concerned.   Yes, my daughter seemed to like to sit close to things, but she had no issues seeing.

When we had our appointment, Dr. Grace had a challenging time seeing what was happening in my daughter’s eyes.  She suggested an evaluation under anesthesia to learn more about her eyes.   On March 18th of this year we did just that.   I’m very glad we did, because it showed her eyes were normal with two exceptions and definitely didn’t show any indication of the issues she’s having today.   The first is that she has somewhat smaller eyes.    You know how these things go though, there’s a spectrum of sizes and my daughter is on the smaller side although her eyes look normal visually.   The name for this is Micropthalmia.   There are increased risks, but it’s not a big factor in anything she has today from what we’ve been told.

The second thing they discovered she has is Anterior Segment Dysgenesis.   Fancy term but it can be broken down to mean something that happened during her development in the front of her eye.   That term is broad though, and can mean lots of things didn’t go just right in the front of her eyes.   In our daughter’s case, some vessels are present across her field of vision.   Here’s a picture of one of her eyes from the March 18th evaluation.  The eye looks a little strange, but that’s just the angle, it’s all normal.   The thing you want to look for is the curtain of vessels inside the iris on the lower half of the eye.   Both eyes have this.

What does this mean?   It means we don’t quite know how she sees the world.   She was seeing 20/20 up close and 20/50 on March 18th, so it wasn’t impeding on her vision too much.

Our hope is we can get her vision back to what it was on March 18th.   So far there are no indications we can’t, but there is a lot of healing and reduction in inflammation that needs to happen in order to get there.

The Big Boy Update:  We have never explained to my son that someone is “Indian” or “black.”   We have a lot of diversity in our neighborhood and school.   Yesterday my son was telling me how he had lunch with Keira.  I told him Keira didn’t go to his school, but he persisted.  Finally he said, “the DARK Keira mom!”   Then I realized, we have a new African American family this year that has a daughter named Keira.   His description was just what I needed to know.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We went to another doctor’s appointment today and had to use multiple elevators to get there.   My daughter suddenly exclaimed, “that’s the elevator’s mouth!” as one of them closed.   She was excited about the rest of the elevators during the day, telling me as their “mouths” opened and closed.  

Fitness Update:  I ran to school to pick up the children today.   It was a nice six mile run through the park, on the greenway, through the art museum property and then over the highway on the pedestrian bridge to get to school.  I met Nana in the car in pickup line to get the children just in time.