Pirate Ben

This last week, I took Ben to the optometrist. We were kind of on a wait & see approach from our last visit to see what would happen with his vision. He is farsighted and has astigmatism in his right eye. However, since his left eye is great, it has taken over and the right eye is not working the way it should. It is called Amblyopia (or "lazy-eye). Basically, the brain is ignoring (to a degree) the messages that it is receiving from the right eye because it is not clear. We had a few options..1) continue to wait and see (which we did and it did not improve at all since the last time), 2) glasses, or 3) patch it. They like to try and avoid glasses, so we decided that we would try patching his good eye and force the brain to accept the messages from the right eye. I would guess that his is on the milder end (the vision in the right eye is 20/40), since I've been doing some reading and some kids have vision that is 20/400 and have to be patched 24/7 for months (if not years). We only have to patch for 1 hour a day. During that one hour, it is recommended to do 20 minutes of near vision work (beading, Lego, colouring etc) to force his eye to work and it also yields better results. So we started this today. We had talked about it over the weekend, and he was open to me putting the patch on this morning. Shortly after, while Ernie was taking his picture, he said "I can't see very well" Poor guy! So, for an hour, Ben, Mattea and I coloured, laced beads, read (which he didn't want to do), played mini-stick hockey and just hung out. He only complained near the end of the hour, and was totally tired (not sure if he was just regular tired, or if it was just a lot of brain energy and wore him out). Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as good...



We will try and patch for 5 out of 7 days for one month and then have a re-check. If things have improved we will continue until it is fully better. If not, we may have to add glasses for 6-12 months!

Our life is never dull!