The First Thing

I really feel the need to document our story here. We do not have a diagnosis yet, but we are dealing with symptoms every day. I really hope these posts will help someone. And it's good for me to "write" it all down.



When Little Bit was 23 or 24 months old she started blinking. A lot. Hard blinks. Lots of people noticed, including us. I worked in the mornings at a preschool and she was in the toddlers class. The class only had 4-6 children in it and 2 teachers. Her teachers and even a substitute all asked me about her eyes. We guessed at first it was probably allergies. Then I became concerned that she had the same condition as my aunt and grandmother with very dry eyes. My aunt had to have surgery to fix hers. Can't remember what it was called now. I asked the pediatritian the next time we were there. He looked at her eyes and said, "They don't look dry to me."

I was so irritated. Obviously something was wrong with her eyes, couldn't he see that? The other thing that had us concerned about her eyes was how she reacted to the sunlight. When our older daughter, Sweetheart, was small she would always bury her head in my shoulder whenever we first walked outside. S gets headaches from the sunlight and it really bothers him if he doesn't wear sunglasses. We just figured she was the same way. We bought her sunglasses. There, problem solved. But Little Bit reacted a bit differently. She screamed! Like she was in total pain. Also huge tears ran down her face. Not tears from crying, but tears from her eyes watering.

So, off we went to the eye doctor. They did all the standard tests on her and determined her eyes were perfectly healthy with the best vision possible for her age. So, why does she blink all the time and scream when the sunlight hits her face?

The doctor told us that she has really pale blue eyes so they let more light in than darker eyes. It probably hurts--get her some sunglasses. We did and in a few months the blinking had gone away. We put it out of our heads.

We would remember the blinking in about another year and a half.