Need help with eye patching

[nebraskachick]

My daughter 3 years old was diagnosed with amblyopia (lazy eye) and esotropia yesterday. Essentially she is is very farsighted 20/400 in the bad eye and 20/200 in the "good" eye. Essentially the very farsighted eye stopped working and is letting her right eye (the "good" eye) do all the work. The treatment for this is glasses that we are waiting on getting in next week and an eye patch for 1-2 hours a day.

Where I need help is getting her to keep that darn eye patch on. I need ideas. ANY little thing would be welcome.

This is what I have tried...

1) explaining why she needs to wear it. ie: that her right is eye is tired and needs a rest while her left eye does the work. I have explained the left eye is sick and needs to work so that it strengthens up.

2) wearing one with her

3) Cool pirate angle

4) offering her a bribe of any present she wants if she wears it for an hour

5) trying to play games, craft projects

6) painting her nails

7) Imprisonment in my arms (the only thing that seems to work but I am being bitten in the process and she is gaging and hyperventilating)


I really don't want this to be a terribly traumatic experience for her. I will if I have to but it is heartbreaking. Right now with the patch on she is screaming that she can't see and that it hurts. She is crying, gagging, hyperventillating, and clawing at her eye patch. I just don't know what to do

 

[Forevryoung]

What I've learned to do (modified for your situation- I've done it with children who wear glasses)-

1) find a really motivating activity that she can do while she has the eye patch- maybe sit and read to her favorite stories so that she can listen and not have to depend on her sight as much, finger painting, play doh... maybe think of something special.

2) get a timer and start by setting it for 1 minute. Tell her that you guys are going to do X activity but she needs to wear the eye patch until the timer goes off. If she does it for 1 minute, take the patch off and throw a party. Go crazy.

3) If she is successful with 1 minute, increase to 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes... I would do this for an hour at first and once she gets the hang of it increase it (I would set the timer in the "patch off" periods too so she knows when to put it back on).

4) IF she refuses, you hold the eye patch in her sight until she puts it on. She is not allowed to play anything else until she puts the eye patch on. Personally, I'm stubborn and I would probably sit there for as long as it took for her to at least try it. She can cry and scream but you don't have to say anything- First eye patch then ______ (whatever she wants to do). Don't feed the battle with negative attention.

Good luck

 

[Piper]

You may be surprised. Back 40 years ago when my daughter was patched, she had to wear the patch all day. She did with no problems and the vision in her "good" eye was worse than your daughter's bad eye! She also had no problems leaving her glasses on. We also did therapy at home for several hours a day and then she had to wear a blue filter on one eye and a red one on the other. We did activities with red and blue crayons and colored pencils. Our TV had a red and blue filter over it (half and half.) Her brother joked that we had color TV before anyone else on the block! She had to wear the filters whenever she watched TV, Her brother joked that we had color TV before anyone else on the block.

 

[buffettgirl]

oh goodness, I feel for you. My daughter (now 18 with 20/35 vision in her "bad" eye yay!) started patching at 6 months old and we continued till age 10 or so. Early on it was hours at a time, but her eye was crossed visibly and after surgery to straighten it at 16 mths we still had to deal with the amblyopia, fixing the vision. She's correct, she CAN"T see when she's got that patch on, but you know that. But it's a frightening thing for her.

I'm not sure what current patches are like, but we used to decorate ours (they were more bandaid like) with stickers and markers and tiny bits of glitter pen. Movies were great. We just tried to distract as best we could. When she was a toddler, honestly it was horrible. Honestly, some early days we had to repeatedly put on patch after patch as she cried through each one. After a few days..sadly to say it like this, we basically broke her and she realized it was going to happen no matter what. We did a lot of rewarding AFTER , not bribing in that sense, but when she even made a suggestion that she was going to tolerate the patch we rewarded her.

Holding down is something you're just going to have to do for a bit and my 2 cents (as cruel as it sounds) is that you may have to do it just now. Be as matter of fact as humanly possible and try to just take yourself and your emotions out of the picture. It's so hard!

Oh, prevent blindness america has a wonderful forum http://preventblindnessamerica.us/cgi-local/discus/discus.cgi?pg=topics
(ok, well, they did back then - my daughter actually appeared in the first "eye patch club" newsletter)

 

[buffettgirl]

oh oh, just thought of something - buy a princess costume (or something that strikes her fancy) and tell her that she can ONLY wear it while wearing her patch.

(it's ALL coming back to me now LOL)

It also helped us to take her out to a playground or somewhere like that - she was less likely to put up a fuss inpublic. That said, we had to make sure that she could actually see, so we had to follow her around like crazy. But truly, it's remarkable. It does work.

 

[PatMcDuck]

My daughter was young when she was diagnosed with lazy eye, maybe age 3 or 4. She was my youngest of 4 kids, when she was born, my oldest was in kindergarden. #3 has Down Syndrome and Autism. #2 had speech delay and ADD. I was somewhat overwhelmed I guess.

Anyway, I tried patching her, but she resisted very strongly. I was not a good enough Mom, I got distracted and did not FORCE her to wear the patch. I would try, many times, and she DID wear glasses from age 4 on to try and help too (she did wear the glasses all the time). I tried sort of patching the glasses as well. I kept trying, but I should have tried much harder. And we saw an eye specialist regularly.

Skip to present day, she is 19. She is legally blind in her bad eye. It is my fault. She is allowed to drive, but she failed the vision test and we had to get a Drs note. I worry, because she seems to sometimes be impaired when driving once in while, she will adapt more as she drives more. And what if she wanted to be in the Air Force, or be a police officer, etc?? Certain occupations are closed to her. When she wanted to play sports, the drs warned that she should wear protective goggle type glasses, because she should not risk an injury to her one good eye. She hated those too, and avoided sports that required wearing those protective glasses.

So I guess my advice is to keep trying and remember what happened to my daughter. It has not completely ruined her life, and she accepts the situation better than I do, I think. Because I was the adult and she was a strong willed and defiant child (with this issue I mean)..... it was my responsibility to step up and I didn't.

 

[amberg@eastlink.ca]

dd was two when i noticed her lazy eye. considering they told us at 3 wks they didnt think shed see i took it and ran! we battled too. at first it was 2 hrs and her glasses full time. the first few days were hard i wont lie. so heres what i did. we put one on her, one on her best stuffie and one on mommy. that seemed to help her a bit. then i went bingo....time to break out the disney movies!!! so i put on her patch, geared up ariel(our kids hospital had already introd her to this one so i blame them for her obsession!) by the time it and the previews had all been watched her two hrs were up or very close to it. we also got the cool girly print ones too. and let her pick which one out of the box so she felt she had some control over it.

after a few months we had to go up in length, then they jumped it around 3-4 here, 5-6 one week, 2 the next, it drove me bonkers. so be prepared just incase they start moving it around on you. we had to go in for the amblyopic checks every 3 wks to see how she was doing. even harder was doing the charts(at that age they used shapes not letters), she had no desire....and god forbid when they placed her with a student! one was terrible with her and just said to her at the age of 2.5 well we'll just sit here till you do it. um lady do you have any concept of what time is like for a 2.5 yr old? you'll be here all week. lol

good luck, its not fun, but will come to an end at some point, i promise! for us, it was abotu 1 month before our first disney trip when she was just four. they suggested just taking it off for pics at the world. um do you have any idea how many pics you take at disney? lord! lol i jumped for joy the day we were done. shes now 6 and while i really only notice it when a shes tired, b without her glasses, or c focusing on something held at about where her nose is, i know its still there, but that her vision remains in that eye.

after she was dx'd with it i remember reading a readers digest article saying if its not caught by age 6 they can loose the sight in that eye since they use the stronger one to do all the work. pretty scary to think of and i was so glad it was caught in time. good luck. in the end it will be worth it for her, and one day im sure she will thank you!

 

[kylieh]

DD went for a walk each day with hers. EG, walk to the end of the street and back, maybe 300 meters tops. She did this with her Nan who needed that distance walk 2 - 3 times per day. It was a verrryyyy slow walk but it helped. The also did colouring and painting with the patch.

In hindsight I guess we were very luck and didn't have any real probs with her wearing it. Move ahead a few years and we had surgery, but we were fortunate enough that both eyes work, not together, but individually both perfect! We used to wish that they weren't perfect so she would be a candidate for glasses that may of assisted.

 

[nuts4wdw]

My son was dx'ed with amblyopia in the 2nd grade and he is autistic. So patching was next to impossible. We went to the dr. after numerous attempts to promise him the world if he would "just wear the patch" and we were given a prescription for eye drops that dialated the "bad" eye for 2 to 3 days. That way he didn't have to wear the patch. He preferred it. The negative side is that it is continual and they don't get a break from it. It did help though. That's what we did!