A anonymous guest post today offers a warning to all other mums.
My sister already had 3 girls but had tried for the last time for a boy. When he was born everyone was delighted, after all those years she had got a boy, everything was wonderful. She has a lazy eye, all babies eyes wander when they are babies and i remember her saying how her husband has realised after their fourth that its normal and he would even joke about it. When he was 5 months old she was told he had to wear glasses to straighten his eye obviously assuming he had a lazy eye like his mom.
I was sat round her house and we went through pictures of him when he was a baby with their new expensive slr camera they had bought. I noticed in a few of the pictures one of his eyes looked different, almost like a cats eye reflection. I said to her at the time that’s not normal i swear its a sign of something bad, shed replied well the optician said it was fine. In retrospect I wish I would have jumped up and down and said go and get another opinion please, but I didn’t. I was confident in not only what she had told me but that the optician and hospital had said he was fine.
When he was 10 months old his eye started wiggling. He was then referred to a specialist who diagnosed him with cancer. He had it since he was born and the news was devastating for the whole family, his eye wiggled because his retina had detached from his eye ball. That week was the longest of my life, from finding out he had a problem on the friday but not knowing what to finding out he had cancer on the monday and finding out whether it was terminal on the wednesday.
I happy to say it wasnt terminhal but was told had he have been left for even as short as 3 weeks it would have been. I felt very guilty at first for not having jumped up and down and asked her to seek a second opinion and tried to stay away, I came to realize this was how I coped. He went though 6 months of chemo and has had his central line taken out.
He is closely monitored now ever six weeks to see if his tumours are stable or not.
Please may I say to all you mummies if you see any picture of a baby with a cats eye, stamp your feet if you have to but be seen by a specialist, my nephews has impared vision because his diagnoses took so long which could have been avoided if he was seen earlier x
