For Granted

Since she was born, one of my favorite characteristics of Addie has been her eyes. They started out dark blue but by the time she was three months old had changed to a mesmerizing caramel, outlined in blue. They express all of her emotions to the point that you know what she's thinking before she says it. They sparkle, they engage. I just love to look at them, and many other people have commented on them as well.


The week before July 4, I snapped a picture as Carter was reading to her, and immediately knew from looking at the digital display that something wasn't right. If you've never heard about white pupils in pictures, pay attention. They can mean nothing, but they can also mean retinoblastoma (eye cancer sometimes resulting in eye removal, but not always) or a tracking problem with the eyes that can cause blindness. Well, when I looked at the picture, this is what I saw:


As you can see, the left eye looks fine, but the right eye reflected solid white. I knew of this danger because a friend at church had this same thing show up in a picture of her daughter and her daughter had the tracking problem. It was fixed by wearing eye patches over the good eye to strengthen the weak eye. My husband had never heard of it and thought maybe it was a freak incident. But I googled it and showed him research, to which he responded to call the doctor. We were referred to a pediatric ophthalmologist and we saw him today.

For three weeks, I sweated and prayed, too scared to really tell anyone.
Lord, not her eyes. But then if not her eyes, what part of her body would I choose? None of it. No area of her body. She is my darling.

We have friends who have lost children, friends whose children have survived cancer at a high cost of deep suffering. Just to watch my kids be sick with a minor cold or stomach virus is about more than I can stand. I would gladly take all of their suffering on myself if they could just live pain free. But this life is not so. I know all too well that because sin entered the world, we all have bodies that will fail some day. Some of us will be old, some young. Some of us will suffer terrible things in our lives. All will experience loss.

Addie is fine. But what I saw WAS, in fact, a reality. She has a rare thing called bilateral coloboma. And the doctor himself said that her eye color pattern is a rarity and a beautiful one. :) In a certain place in the eye, coloboma can completely destroy the eye and cause blindness, but in her case (and this is in both eyes), it will not hinder her and does not have to be treated. It goes hand in hand with a lot of mental handicaps, but can also occur in an otherwise developmentally "normal" child. Basically, it is an area that when the eye rounds out in utero, it is supposed to fuse together without a seam. In coloboma, a seam is left, an area that lacks tissue development, and this literally causes a white spot in the midst of healthy, red tissue (the doc, who was amazing, by the way, showed me pics of this in one of his textbooks, and answered ALL my questions). I'm thinking of this seam as proof that Addie was "knit together" (rf Psalm 139) in my womb. But as I said, in her case, she can live her whole life and not worry about it. We will go back every two years for an eye exam to be sure she is fine. The doctor told me after the fact though that when he initially saw a glimmer of white, his heart sank. He was almost as thankful as I was to say that there was no cancer in her eye.

A huge reality caught up with me, though. I've lived it before, but had to face it again. We will all leave this earth some day. There are things in our bodies, like benign coloboma, that we cannot see. There is much, much more. But the biggest thing invisible to the eye is the sin condition marring our spirits. Praise God for redemption.

And praise God for today, for a day to live and all of my family to live. We never know how many days there are. Tonight, we made sandwiches and ate them in the student union at Belhaven because Daniel had to teach a class. As three hundred ballerinas filed in to eat from dance camp, Addie got so excited. She approached a small group of girls and asked, "Are you ballerinas?" And she told me, "I like the way they step down those stairs!" They were immediately captivated and took her to sit at their table. She had the time of her life while her brother sat at the grand piano and entertained others. My cup runneth over. May I never take one day for granted.

Addie with her new ballerina friends.