A nine- month- old baby girl born with one eye is undergoing a grueling procedure to stretch her socket to prevent her face from drooping.
Izabella Myers has been wearing a plastic ball since the age of three months to prevent her left orbit from closing as her skull develops.
Now, the nine-month-old is getting a bigger ball every two weeks as she gets ready for a procedure to give her an artificial eye. The expanders serve the purpose of stretching the socket and absorbing bodily fluid surrounding the skin until it’s big enough to hold a prosthetic eye.
Without the glass eye, Izabella’s face will not develop evenly, as currently her left side droops by about half an inch.
But her mother Alexis Miller, 27, from Pennsylvania, revealed she would prefer her little girl not to be given one.
She said: ‘Medically, Izabella needs a prosthetic eye, but if she didn’t, I’d rather wait until she was old enough to decide for herself if she wants one.
‘The day she gets it will be bittersweet. I love the way she is now and she’ll be different with two eyes.
‘I don’t think she needs to change to fit in.’
Izabella’s condition is called microphthalmia, a condition where one or both eyeballs are abnormally small. Ms Miller first learned about her daughter’s condition during her 20 week scan, when doctors couldn’t see anything where her left eye should be.
Doctors found traces of tissue, meaning the eye had started to grow but then stopped.
‘I was devastated. No-one wants their child to have that problem.
‘When she was born though, I thought she was beautiful.’ Ms Miller added.
Microphthalmia affects about 1 in every 10,000 children. In Izabella’s case, it was passed to her from her father Eric Myers, 35. Mr Myers revealed his great grandmother also suffered from microphthalmia.
The baby girl can blink and cry – but when she sleeps, she does so with her left socket wide open.
Ms Miller said: ‘At the moment, people stare at Izabella and ask questions.
‘As she gets older, she’ll understand what people are saying and I’m worried how she’ll be treated at school as even wearing a prosthetic, people will be able to tell something’s different.
‘But I’ll tell her not to listen to the comments and that she can do anything she puts her mind to.
Ms Miller revealed that her sister, Kyliegh, eight, was scared of her at first but has since grown to love her.
Culled from nairobiwire.com
