A mother whose child was born without one eye described the arduous surgery the infant must go through to extend her socket.
Nine-month-old Izabella Myers was born without her left eye.
She started wearing an expander at the age of three months to keep the socket from sealing over while her skull is still expanding.
Now, she receives increasingly larger expanders every two weeks to enlarge the socket and make it large enough to accommodate a prosthetic eye. These expanders are clear balls that absorb body fluid from the tissue around them.
However, her mother Alexis Miller, 27, said she would prefer that her daughter no
Izabella needed a prosthetic eye for medical reasons, but if she didn’t, she should wait until she was old enough to make that decision for herself, the wOᴍᴀɴ added.
Her receiving it day will be bittersweet. Although I adore her as she is right now, she will change once she has two eyes.
During her 20-week ultrasound, when physicians were unable to find anything where her left eye should be, Alexis, a stay-at-home mother from Pennsylvania in the United States, first learnt about her daughter’s problem.
I was devastated, the wOᴍᴀɴ continued. Nobody wants such issue for their child.
Izabella was formally identified as having microphthalmia, a rare disorder in which one or both eyes are abnormally small, at the time of her birth.
The infant’s tissue traces were validated by medical professionals, indicating that her eye had begun to develop but had halted.
Further research led to the conclusion that Izabella’s ailment was brought on by a lack of chromosomes from her 35-year-old father Eric Myers, whose great, great grandmother also had the condition.
In order to extend her eye socket, the ʙᴀʙʏ is currently undergoing a difficult treatment. She is hoping to be equipped with a prosthetic before turning one.
In order to ensure that her face develops uniformly, the prosthetic eye is a medical necessity because the left side of her face currently droops by around half an inch.
She can blink and cry till then, but when she goes to sleep, her left socket is wide open.
She is working with a therapist to help strengthen her right eye because she is blind on one side and must rotate her body to see objects on her left.
I’m concerned about how she’ll be treated at school since even when she wears a prosthesis, people will be able to tell soᴍᴇᴛʜing is ᴏᴅᴅ as she gets older and understands what people are saying.
But I’ll reassure her that she can do anything if she puts her mind to it and to ignore the criticism.
Izabella’s eight-year-old sister, Kyliegh (COR), initially resisted being held by her out of ғᴇᴀʀ.
She tells people she was born without an eye and that she now adores her. She is the same as everyone else and still looks stunning.
