Well that escalated quickly!

Yesterday Sam took Caleb to the Opthamologist. We had received a referral to one because we had noticed Caleb's left eye sometimes wanders off a little (as seen in this picture)

Sam called me before he even left the visit. "It's not good" he said, "It's not good". I had been laying down since I was sick and it took me a minute to wake up and understand him. He told me that they said he had calcium behind his eye and also some bleeding. His retina was also detached. "He might be blind" is all I was left with before Sam said he had to go, that the Dr was coming back in the room. About and hour or so later Sam and Caleb came come. Of course, Caleb was as happy as could be. He ran up to me screaming "Mommy!!!" and ran to play with his brother. Sam passed me some paperwork, the heading on it read "COAT'S DISEASE".

 As I read though the information, the paper got blurry and suddenly moist. I couldn't believe what I was reading. How did we go from thinking our child had something as small as a lazy eye to having blindness and evening possibly losing his eye? I started researching Coat's disease using http://www.coatsdisease.org/index.html . We spent all night going though the website, getting information and also looking through our pictures. I have a DSLR and I really dislike using my flash to take pictures so I try to shoot in natural light, so I have very few that have a flash in the picture. However, we were able to find 2 pictures that supported evidence of Coat's disease. One around 18 months or so and another at about 2 1/2 years.

As you can see in both of these pictures, Caleb's left eye has a reflective, whitish to yellowish quality to it (the first picture with the red eye on the right eye is normal). Sammy and I felt as if we had punched in the gut when we saw this. How could we not have noticed this when we took the pictures? How did it not stand out? Please, if you have little ones, take a second look at your pictures. Look at the pictures your friends post of their children. If you notice anything like you see here, let your Dr know. The sooner this is caught, the more likely they are to restore sight and prevent blindness. We have a cat scan on Wed to get a full diagnosis and know exactly where we stand with Caleb but they are pretty certain he is at stage 3 and not too sure surgery is an option, so it may be too late for him. Please keep him in your prayers. Feel free to share his story to get the word out there about Coat's disease.