October 29, 2009

All lot of prep work, with Halloween coming and the birthday's. I took a couple of vacation day's from work so I could prepare. While I had time off, I continued to research amblyopia. I did find a promising research done on children 7 to 17 and with wearing corrective glasses and patching they still showed some improvement in the "lazy eye". Very promising. The depressing part is that they aren't as likely to reach 20/20 vision even with correction, and they will more than likely need to patch as sort of a maintenance in order to encourage constant communication with the brain. And I have come to terms with the fact that Billy will be wearing glasses for the rest of his life.

The most frustrating thing has been so far, that I had no idea this was going on. In hind sight I can recognize certain behaviors that were obviously caused by his vision. At the time, it didn't seem to be a problem though. He would move closer and closer to the TV. He would sometimes cover one eye when he was concentrating on something, but I thought it was a nervous habit of his.

He also didn't do well enough in Kindergarten to move forward to first grade. He is in TK1 program this year. They told me at the school that his chronological age and his developmental age didn't match and that is why he wasn't ready for first grade. I am now questioning that. Mostly because Billy has a memory to beat all memories. And I feel that he was struggling but never said anything. He never complained about not being able to see something and he never had any headaches. There weren't really any signs of what was going on.

With the research I have done, I have found that it is very common that there are no signs with this form of this disorder. And that it is a leading cause of vision loss in children. But only 2 out of every 100 children have amblyopia, and only 1.7% of those children have the "refractive amblyopia". This also got me thinking. How come there isn't more information out there about this disorder so parents are aware that they should have their children screened before entering preschool. I also want to look into why he was screened this year at school and not in Kindergarten.