Bespectacled

Poor Claire needs corrective glasses. She actually likes to wear sunglasses and treasures a pair of pink, faux diamond studded ones which she got for Christmas. Now, she has to wear spectacles whether she likes it or not!

Around a month ago, I started to notice that she had a slight squint. Occasionally, when she looked at you, her left eye would be looking outwards, instead of straight ahead like her right eye.

Hubby also has bad eyesight and has an eye disease called keratoconus. It is basically a disease where the cornea, or outer layer of the eye becomes cone shaped. It usually onsets around puberty and can progress into rapidly deteriorating eyesight. In short, Hubby was 'almost blind' (his own words) and ended up on the waiting list for a cornea transplant.

When an available cornea came about, Hubby was supposed to fly in to Singapore as soon as possible. He rejected the first one, because they called up during Chinese New Year. Then after the second call, he immediately accepted, because you only get to reject 3 times or something like that and after that you're removed from the waiting list.

So anyway, Hubby went to the Singapore National Eye Centre to get someone else's cornea stitched into his eye! Later, after the surgery, when he removed his eye patch, his friend joked that he had gotten a blue eye!!  

Hahahah... (FYI: he just got someone's cornea, a thin transparent outer layer, not the whole eyeball!!)

So anyway, with all this history of eye disease in the family, I thought it would be wise to get Claire and Annie to have their eyes checked.

After a visit to the ophthalmologist (eye specialist doctor), we found that Annie's eyesight was fine, thank goodness. Claire's slight squint was harmless, because she could control it. Her left eye would drift outwards when she was tired or a bit 'spaced out' but she could pull it back in when she paid attention. We had to make sure it did not develop into a lazy eye though. She might just not bother using her left eye and in the end that eye would deteriorate.

However, after some tests, he found that she seemed to have quite bad astigmatism in both eyes. The doctor wasn't 100% sure of the degree because she was fidgeting quite a bit. So he referred us to my ex-primary school classmate's mum, who is a very dedicated optometrist. The best in Sarawak I dare say. She is also the one who finally detected Hubby's eye condition, after he went to so many 'optometrists' to keep changing glasses when his eyesight was deteriorating badly.

The doctor himself told me that she was the only one who would do the procedure which Claire needed. This involved putting eye drops into children's eyes so that their pupils would dilate and you could then get an accurate reading. The drops sting a bit and Claire has always detested eye drops! I usually don't even bother to try giving her eye drops when she has red eye, because it's near impossible to hold her down and get them in her eyes!!

Sure enough, at the optometrist's shop, two people had to hold her down while the optometrist and I tried to pry open her eyelids which she forced shut really tight!! (This was after trying the positive methods like sweet talk and chocolate!)

After the ordeal, we found she was not short or long-sighted, but her astigmatism was around 400 degrees on both sides! I pray that it won't get progressively worse like her dad's. It's so unfair that these things come in packages; keratoconus is linked to atopic disease like asthma, allergies and eczema. Claire has allergies and eczema, luckily not asthma. So, hopefully keratoconus also won't be included in her 'package'!

Anyway, she chose a cute, red pair of glasses which have a kitty named 'Saki' on the sides. She told me secretly, when we were alone that she really liked the glasses she chose, but she was very shy and did not want to wear them to school. I guess it will take her a while to get used to them. She has a classmate who also wears glasses, so I suppose she'll get around to wearing them in school soon.

While we were there, Eva was also tested and so far seems to be okay. So we'll be visiting the optometrist every 6 months from now on and will have to keep an eye on Solomon too when he's older, because keratoconus is more prevalent in males!