Procrastinet

Charles Winkus

filed under: Dadditudes

In the general dearth of Procrastinet posting, I missed talking about a significant family event.

From the time Charlie was born, other than noting that he looked just like I did as a baby (this has since been confirmed with family photo albums, and the resemblance is sometimes spooky), we also noticed that his left eye never opened as far as the right. We asked the doctor about it at his in-hospital visit, and he suggested it was probably swelling from the birth.

A week later it was still noticeable, so we asked another of the pediatricians in our practice. She suggested a tear duct was blocked and that we should massage it regularly.

Another week later, after we had dutifully jabbed our fingertips into the corner of the poor tyke's eye every couple of hours, his left eye was still at half mast. Moreover, it wasn't developing the crease that was allowing the right eye to retract. We asked the pediatrician again and, with the long suffering sigh of one accustomed to dealing with over-concerned parents, she huffed that we should go ahead and see a specialist if it would make us feel better, but it was really just a tear duct issue.

Well, no. Nana reminded us that her sister, Charlie's Great Aunt Phyllis, was born with ptosis in both eyelids which had been corrected with surgery. With much Googling and Wikipedia-ing we had come to suspect that was what Charlie had, as well.

The ophthalmologist took one look and said "ah, yes. Congenital ptosis." For those not familiar (as I wasn't), ptosis (pronounced "toe-sis") is a problem with the muscles of the eyelid. In his left eye, Charlie doesn't have proper muscles but instead fibrous tissue. Luckily, the eyelid clears the pupil at least most of the time, so he's getting visual input and his sight can develop normally. He'll have a procedure (what the ophtho called "a fun little surgery") when he's about two, to insert a silicon rod that will more firmly knit the fibrous tissue to his eyebrow muscle, allowing him to use his eyebrow to fully raise the eyelid.

So expect my son to affect a permanently surprised expression, starting in eighteen to twenty-four months.

I have to say, after obsessing about the "winky eye" during the period where we weren't sure what it was, I've now become quite fond of it. Charlie wouldn't look quite so much like Charlie without it.

And Forest Whitaker and Thom Yorke (fellow ptosics) now loom large in our family mythology...

Of course it turned out later we needn't have wondered for so long - Charlie's Uncle Bob and Aunt Judy (pediatrician/pediatric nurse, respectively) confirmed that they had identified the ptosis in the very first picture they saw of him. That's what we get for not requesting an in-family consult.

[UPDATED to correct the timeline and properly attribute Nana as the first one to correctly identify the droop as ptosis.]

Posted by rjt at April 28, 2008 07:24 AM