I took Matthew to his pediatric eye doctor last Friday. On Monday (maybe Sunday?) I noticed he was blinking hard with both eyes..Matthew never blinks like that. The only thing "new" that we did was get the dilating drops in his eyes. Here we are one week later and Matthew is still blinking and doing it more often. It is very disturbing for me to watch. I called his eye doc and his advice was to put saline drops in Matthew's eyes whenever he blinked...that would teach him to stop blinking (aka punish him)..I don't think so! Matthew is NOT blinking on purpose...watch the video, it is completely involuntary (he is trying to watch a Veggie Tales movie).
I found out that Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital has an Eye Emergency Room so we are driving 1.5 hours tomorrow to find it! Hopefully someone there will tell us what we can do about this...I firmly believe it is a side effect of the drops which contain: cyclopentolate hydrochloride, benzalkonium chloride, boric acid, edetate disodium, potassium chloride, sodium carbonate, and hydrochloric acid. Please pray that the blinking stops.
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SATURDAY UPDATE: The trip to Hopkins was a total waste of time. There was a young Resident on duty there and he obviously had no experience with such blinking or kids for that matter. He actually wanted to put more dilating drops in Matthew's eyes to examine him. I said NO WAY and he said there was nothing else for him to do. I kept asking: "What is this?...Why did it start and how do I stop it?...Have you ever seen this before?" He had no answers and told me to see our pediatrician. Wow, I drove all the way to Baltimore for that?!
13 comments:
I'm praying for you guys. The video is very hard to watch. My heart goes out to you both.
-Maria
Let us know how it turns out!
BTW, we're on round 3 (started today) of DMSA chelation (25 mg capsule)-- every 3-4 hours for 3 days (then 11 days off). Z is showing great progress and some WORDS are starting to show up! (Today it was "Oh, man!" when Swiper was defeated by Dora!)
Keep up up-to-date on Matthew's chelation progress!!
- C
Bless his little heart. Cyndi...bless yours too.
Please keep us posted on what the results are.
Poor guy. He is a trooper. And a really cute one at that.
Thinking of you...
mac :-)
I hope you can find some answers tomorrow. That blinking certainly does not look voluntary - poor little guy. I'll say a prayer for you tonight.
I'm so sorry you are going through this. You have my prayers for safety and answers tomorrow.
Hope you get to the bottom of this.
Wow, this is a few days after the drops? Let us know what they say about it.
On your update: Frustrating!
Oh goodness. Praying you get some answers soon...
I'm sorry for little Matthew. How is it going this week?
Hello, this is my first time by and I have to agree that Matthew is very cute! I've had the dilating drops and they are awful. The hardest part for me was that they made any bright light painful. Is it possible that he was blinking defensively at first and now is either stuck in that defensive mode or, because his system is more sensitive, is still feeling the effects? The saline idea is so cruel that I almost think that you should report the eye doc to someone.
My younger son started doing this last year. I could not figure out what was causing it. It was not too long after he saw the eye doctor. One thing that has helped has been supplementing magnesium with a banana a day. I hope that helps and that you get to the bottom of it.
Betsy
Saw this on autism web and thought of your post about Matthew:
http://www.autismweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15465&highlight=zinc
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