My Story Part 1: Born With Strabismus, Patching, Glasses and 3 Surgeries

hi my name is Melissa Daniels and I have strabismus and if you've been following

this channel for a while you will know that I have been working so hard on

getting my brain to use both of my eyes together and it's been a long process

involving vision therapy and surgery but one question that I get all the time is

how did it start though this video is all about those first few years of my

life being diagnosed with strabismus congenital esotropia and what my parents did to help correct

that and how it worked now if you want to know more details about this you can always go to my

website strabismusolutions.com and I have a timeline there that basically takes you through everything

from the time I was born up until now but this is the video version of that so when I was born

My parents didn't notice anything at first, but by the time I was about four months old

a friend of my mom's mentioned to her, like, did you notice that your daughter's eyes are

turning in? And my mom hadn't really thought anything of it. She just thought it was cute that my eyes were crossed

But the friend kind of helped her understand, like, no, this is a serious medical problem

and you should take her to an ophthalmologist. They did their research. They asked around and everyone said, this is who you go to

This is who you go to. and they went in measured my eyes I had 45 to 50 diopters of esotropia and was diagnosed with

congenital esotropia which is basically when you were born with your eyes crossed and they were

crossed very severely and so as most ophthalmologists do we started with glasses and patching

so we would they would patch one eye for a full day the whole time I was awake and then they would

switch and patch the other day, the next, sorry, the other eye the next day

And it was very obvious it was not working. My eye turn was actually getting more severe By the time they decided to do surgery at six months it was at like 55 to 60 diopters So it had gotten even worse once we tried the patching and the glasses

And so they decided to go ahead and do surgery, did surgery on both of my eyes

and got it quite a bit better. But according to the notes

I still had 20 diopters of esotropia. So they gave me glasses with prism

to try to help me align my eyes. And so it was really important

that I wore those glasses, trying to get my brain to engage both eyes at that time, like that six

months to 12 months, that's like a huge time for developing stereo vision. So looking at the notes

it's obvious to me that that's what the doctor was hoping to be able to achieve. And unfortunately

yeah, I was coming in like every month or even like every couple of weeks and it just, it wasn't

it wasn't helping at all. I wouldn't wear the glasses. Once the doctor told her how important

it was for me to be wearing the glasses. My mom actually went and got a straight jacket and put it

on me. I was a nine-month-old little baby, put me in a straight jacket so that I couldn't bend my

arms to take off my glasses. And it was really hard for her. She said for about a month, she just

held me all day because I would cry. I wanted to pull my glasses off, but she knew how important

it was for me to develop good vision. And even though it didn't work, I'm still so grateful that

she tried, right? That was the, everything she knew. And maybe, maybe it did work on some level

with my peripheral or something, maybe something did work. But according to all the notes from my

doctor's visits throughout the years, I never had any sort of stereo vision. I never used my eyes

together. So by between the ages of two and seven, I did patching, lots and lots of patching. I got

old enough to where they could actually do a more I don't know in-depth exam

because I could actually respond and realize that I definitely had amblyopia in my right eye and so instead of switching alternating from one eye to the other for patching we just only patched the left eye most of the day I was wearing a patch and then always

glasses as well and the amblyopia and the vision in my eye was like 120 in my right eye and like

30 20 in my left eye and so after patching and all of that we got it to 2030 in 2020 and so I

never had to patch again after about age seven, which was fantastic. I love not having to patch

I was lucky enough. I never really got teased in school. I went to a really small school

and I was with the same group of kids from kindergarten up until fourth grade. And so

this whole time that I was patching and wearing glasses and all of this, I was with the same group

of kids. So they were used to it. They knew from kindergarten. I was the girl who wore patches and

glasses and never got teased. And I don't think anyone noticed my eye turn because it was covered

with a patch. The notes are unclear. Like I was saying before about the exotropia, esotropia

right? Like they're saying my eye was 20 diopters in and then all of a sudden it switches to

exotropia and it was just slight. And then it slowly got worse and worse. And by the time I was

seven, it was about 20 diopters of exotropia and they decided to do a third surgery. The results

were great. My eyes were really close to perfect alignment. You know, the notes say zero to five

diopters of exotropia. So I was pretty, pretty minimal. And I only came in and then I think they

said, don't come in for another couple of years. And so we continued, I didn't have to patch

but I continued wearing glasses with prism and, and going through life. And when I came

when I was nine years old, they basically said, you've gotten as far as you can get

And you're stable. Your, your vision is very stable. You don't need to worry about wearing

glasses anymore. I never wore glasses again. And there's, there's only one more note. When I was

12 years old was the last time I went to the ophthalmologist. And so I went in because I felt

like the vision in my right eye was really blurry And it funny because in the notes it was still 20 30 in my right eye and 20 20 in my left But I think I just became more aware by the time I was

12. And I was like, you know, I would do this kind of thing. And I'd be like, something's wrong with

this eye. It's not as good. Like I just didn't realize. And there's also a note that I was

it was turning occasionally, like it was intermittently turning out, but I didn't even

notice that. I just noticed the blurriness was bothering me. So went in when I was 12 and they

didn't really say much um they basically I can't even remember how it ended but I just never went

back we moved we moved far away we moved to California and that was the last time I went

to an ophthalmologist until I was 32 years old and so they definitely like all that work they did when

I was little it got my eyes to a place where they were stable where my eyes weren't turning too much

They still would intermittently, but for the most part, they stayed within the range that it wasn't noticeable to the naked eye, you know, within 15 to 20 diopters of exotropia

So they're just a little bit out. Every now and then we'd get a school picture that it looked really bad

But for the most part, just when I was tired, my eye would wander more. And so I think they decided to stop my parents, the doctors, because it was like they did so much for so many years and got me to where they thought was the best I could get

In the next video, I'm going to talk a little bit more about how this affected me in school, during high school, college, and the things that I noticed while I was in school that made it challenging

and what the eye turn meant for me in those years. And then in future videos

we'll kind of talk about how I discovered vision therapy and why I decided to go that route

So subscribe and you'll get notifications when that next one posts, but I post every Friday

So keep looking for these videos if you wanna hear the rest of the story. We'll see you in the next one