Amblyopia Eye Exercises

We'd moved from patching to dilating and then to only eye exercises. Quite a while ago I blogged about Joey getting diagnosed with Amblyopia. I've learned so much about that condition and about Joey since then. We started out trying to patch his glasses with an opaque sticker type patch. The net result was that Joey pretty much stopped wearing his glasses. Can you blame him? The boy's not stupid and the glasses were much harder to see out of. So, the doctor moved to dilation. This meant that every morning I put 1 drop of a dilating solution in his eye and he constantly walked around out of focus. This was to force the weaker eye to work...and that strategy really worked for us. He took the drop like a man. I was so proud of him. He never even really complained about it. I could tell he was eager for us to get to the end of that phase, but he really was such a trooper. I can't say that I would have handled it as well. The biggest problem was that it made it very hard to read at first, and Joey LOVES to read. The fact that he loves to read is such a postive that I hated to do something that might turn him off reading. His reading dramatically reduced for a few weeks, but then he adjusting and got right back to it.

After about 4 months, the doctor finally said we could stop dilating. Now we are down to only the eye exercises. These are boring to Joey, so they warrant much more complaining. But he does them and I can't wait to see if he gets improvement from these as well. For one exercise, he puts a pirate patch over one eye, under his glasses. There is a large letter chart on the wall and a tiny letter chart in his hand. Each chart has a grid of letters and numbers 10 by 10. He has to read the first four off of one and the next four off of the other and continue to switch back and forth. This forces his focus to move in and out. He has to be pretty close to the wall chart to see the letters with his weaker eye so he has to stay that close for his stronger eye. The idea is to treat both eyes the same so the even out their efforts. And, of course, our goal if for him to be able to move back away from the large chart slower but surely. When his weak eye is tired, he turns his head to look out the side of his eye like my grandmother used to do when she first got macular degeneration. At the very beginning of his eye exercises every night, I stand behind him and hold his head straight so we can work on his Optic Posture. The doctor has been talking to us about Optic Posture for a while now. Joey is really taking to this...after the first 10 minutes of whining. I don't begrudge him the whining about this. With what he's going through with his vision, I'd be whining all the time!