October 2, 1986 – First Surgery at 6 Months Old

My first surgery was just after I turned 6 months old. My mom took me to get professional pictures taken the day before the surgery and I love it. She didn’t want to forget her cross-eyed baby after they fixed my eye turn. That right there is a mother’s love. She saw no imperfection, she put that cross-eyed baby into a time capsule. Some mothers might have waited to get the pictures until after surgery corrected the eyeturn, but I am so grateful that she got them before and captured this time in my life.

My optometrist friend explained that the first surgery was “a resection of the lateral rectus muscle on the left eye and a myectomy of the inferior oblique muscle in the right eye.” This means almost nothing to me, but it is apparently a very common surgical correction for esotropia.

My mom remembers the doctor explaining that they were reattaching the muscles in different ways, trying to guess how they were going to grow and change over the next few years until they stopped growing around age 8. The goal was to get my eyes both looking straight so that I could learn to use them together. They corrected as much as possible with the surgery, then used glasses with prisms to keep my eyes straight.

At my pre-op appointment my eye turn (esotropia) was measured at 55-60 diopters at near and far, at my post-op appointment, it was down to 15 diopters at near and 5-10 diopters at far. I call that a success!

My parents and siblings all tell stories about trying to keep my glasses on when I was so tiny. After my surgery, I was older and more mobile and took my glasses off constantly. My brother who was about 9 years old at the time remembers me as the “demon baby.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, I think I look adorable.

The doctor told my parents that if I didn’t wear my glasses consistently, that the surgery would never work. The glasses kept my eyes straight so that they could learn to see together. He stressed the importance and they took it seriously. It became such a constant struggle that my mom bought a type of straight jacket to put on my arms so that I couldn’t take the glasses off. She then spent several weeks holding me while I got used to it. The doctor’s notes say that during the time from about 6 months to 1 year I went from wearing them rarely, to wearing glasses 80% of the time. A huge thank you to my parents and siblings for putting up with me during that time. I have an 18-month-old now and can’t even imagine keeping glasses on her!

I patched each eye every other day for 7 hours in an effort to keep both eyes strong. At this point, they weren’t able to tell that I had amblyopia along with strabismus.

I ended up having surgery three months later to fine-tune what was done in the first surgery, read more here.

A special thank you to my friend, an optometrist, who helped me interpret all of my medical records and for my mom who was a picture taking and scrapbooking queen so that I could piece together my childhood experiences with strabismus.