The Rankin Zoo 

Hey, maybe now that a couple of hurdles have been hurdled I’ll start updating the blog more often. I guess only time will tell.

If you’re reading this you probably know that Pearl was born with strabismus. This is a condition which causes her eyes to not work together properly. In Pearl’s case, her eyes tend to angle out - which is called exotropia (or, if you’re not a doctor, wall-eyed). Congenital (from birth) exotropia is apparently fairly uncommon and is usually associated with other scary problems. However, Pearl has undergone a battery of tests (okay, mostly just an MRI of the brain) which seem to indicate that there isn’t any obvious cause of her condition.

What does this mean? Well, practically speaking it means that when Pearl looks at something only one eye is pointing at that something and the other eye is pointing at something else. This is kind of confusing when you’re interacting with her because it’s hard to tell what she’s looking at. The eye doctor is fairly confident that she sees well with each eye individually and that she basically just uses whichever eye she feels like to look at things. Apparently, her brain is able to selectively ignore what the other eye is seeing, preventing her from having double vision.

The deviation is pretty dramatic with Pearl’s eyes. As she’s gotten older she has actually been able to pull her eyes together to focus on things from time to time but it usually doesn’t last long and one of her eyes drifts off. To prevent her brain from permanently giving up on one eye and just use the other for seeing things we have had to patch one of her eyes each day for about 90 minutes. We alternate the eye that we patch, forcing her to keep using both eyes.

The doctor said that technically we didn’t have to do anything to fix Pearl’s condition. She would likely have gone through life without much trouble seeing things. Her depth perception would have been impacted, but even there it’s not like she would have had no ability to perceive depth. However, if nothing else, it’s a bit of a cosmetic issue having one of her eyes all over the place.

So, to continue a long story and make it longer, last week Pearl had surgery on her eyes to hopefully correct her strabismus. Believe it or not, this procedure involves moving the muscles on the side of the eyeballs in order to realign them. It seems scary but it is apparently a fairly routine and risk free thing (hey, even her eye doctor has had the procedure done on him… I’m not sure if that’s good or bad).

She came out of it great. The anesthesia took a while to wear off but her eyes look pretty good - not too swollen and just a little red. It’s to early to tell if the procedure was successful but we can already see that her eyes are aligned much better. Se may need an additional adjustment down the road but it’s too soon to know about that.

We’re very happy to be past the surgery - it had been looming for quite a while. Big sister Coral was very concerned about Pearl but is happy to see that she is doing well.