We just had a regular ophthalmology follow up at Children's this PM.
Not so good this time. :-(
Ethan's right eye (the affected eye) is showing signs of becoming slightly weaker. This means the doctor wants to start patching and eye glasses now. Patching will be 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the next six months. All four hours don't have have to be in a consecutive block. Glasses will be full time but probably will stop after age 8. He will have a follow up om 6 months to see if it's gotten any better and if so, the patching may stop. Or it may not. Depends. But according to the doctor, whatever the outcome, worst case is that it continues until age 8. Then he's done with everything - unless he actually has bad eye sight.
His glasses prescription is very weak though. -1 in the affected eye and nothing in the good eye.
We are going to try to get the prescription filled tomorrow but it depends on if he can find a frame he likes and is comfortable. But chances are we won't actually get the glasses until some time in the new year.
The doctor actually gave us a choice - you can do patching for 4 hours/day for 5 days/week for six months with glasses - or you can patch full time 24/7 for 6 weeks. But we don't think Ethan would take very well to the 2nd alternative so we opted for patching w/ glasses.
The aim is to get the brain to use the bad eye more. Apparently at age 8, the brain is fully trained and you don't need to do it anymore. This is prevent amblyopia - where the brain eventually just stops using the bad eye (and you go blind in the bad eye).
As of now, the doctor is *not* concerned because the difference between the good eye and the bad eye is so small. But he says the time to make the corrections is now and not later.
So glasses start as soon as we get them, and patching starts immediately (so given it's 7PM and we just got home - that probably means starting tomorrow).
-b
