The eyes have it
13/03/07 22:24 Filed in: Diary of a
Dad
So there we were, poised on the edge of superstardom,
Spielberg reaching for the phone to cast our girls as
identical twins in his latest blockbuster, when it
became obvious to us that, despite the weight
difference that had remained between them, they
really weren't very identical identical twins after
all. We had heard many stories about people having to
paint indelible marks on the soles of their twins
feet to tell them apart and we expected Emily's alien
appearance to soften and become a clone of her
sister, but it just didn't happen. Well, she had
softened and stopped looking like ET, but apart from
that we could tell them apart quite easily. (OK, OK,
so I still had trouble every now and again but, being
a bloke I had a reasonable excuse).
Emily's face was definitely rounder, and her eyes were...... kind of smaller and..... oh....... what the....???
A chance glance upward from Emily one day during feeding her revealed something different about her and, in fact, something I can safely say I had never seen before in my life, and it scared the daylights out of me. The iris around her pupils appeared to be melting away, or so I first thought. A little while before this discovery we had been giving eye drops to Emily for a slight case of conjunctivitis and I had the horrible thought that maybe some reaction had occurred and her eyes were dissolving before my own....err.... eyes. A quick check of Rosanna showed that, although slight, she had some evidence of it too.
24 hours later after an A&E visit to Barnet, which resulted in two doctors looking at Emily and saying, "oh blimey, well we haven't a clue what that could be...", and a visit to a very nice optometrist at The Royal Free it was discovered that both girls had a birth eye defect called a Coloboma which varies in seriousness from blindness to a purely cosmetic problem. Both girls were, luckily, towards the cosmetic end, although Emily's coloboma is much more pronounced and makes her pupils look keyhole shaped. This throws people for a while when they look at her, until you explain why her eyes look a little odd.
Emily's face was definitely rounder, and her eyes were...... kind of smaller and..... oh....... what the....???
A chance glance upward from Emily one day during feeding her revealed something different about her and, in fact, something I can safely say I had never seen before in my life, and it scared the daylights out of me. The iris around her pupils appeared to be melting away, or so I first thought. A little while before this discovery we had been giving eye drops to Emily for a slight case of conjunctivitis and I had the horrible thought that maybe some reaction had occurred and her eyes were dissolving before my own....err.... eyes. A quick check of Rosanna showed that, although slight, she had some evidence of it too.
24 hours later after an A&E visit to Barnet, which resulted in two doctors looking at Emily and saying, "oh blimey, well we haven't a clue what that could be...", and a visit to a very nice optometrist at The Royal Free it was discovered that both girls had a birth eye defect called a Coloboma which varies in seriousness from blindness to a purely cosmetic problem. Both girls were, luckily, towards the cosmetic end, although Emily's coloboma is much more pronounced and makes her pupils look keyhole shaped. This throws people for a while when they look at her, until you explain why her eyes look a little odd.
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