Share your eye patching stories

[Gena]

DS has been patching for amblyopia since early June. It's been going well overall. He's terrified of the adhesive patch, but will wear the cloth patch over his glasses lens. He has been patching almost full time, at least 8 hours a day. He's made excellent progress. When he started patching, his best corrected vision was 20/50 in his right eye and 20/100 in his left. Now, his vision is an equal 20/50 in both eyes. (That's his vision with glasses. Because of his complex eye problems his vision is not fully correctable.)

Now DS is now doing "maintenance patching". The Ped Ophthamologist says this is to "lock in" the vision correction. I understand what he means and when DS does not wear the patch I can see that he is using only his right eye. He will squint the left eye closed, or cover it, or it will wander/drift. The PO said that some kids need maintenance patching for several months.

He still patches almost full time, including at school. I would prefer that he not have to patch at school, but it seems necessary to get all his hours in. DS doesn't seem to mind patching at school, but I wonder if it causes him any extra difficulties. He's partially mainstreamed now, so I worry about the number of things that set him apart from the other kids.

I know lots of parents here have kids who patch or did patch. (Or patched themselves as kids). So please share your stories. I really would like to know:

- How long did your child patch for (ie weeks, months, years)? Did you need to do maintenance patching? If so, for how long?

- How long per day did/does your child patch? Was it different for maintenance patching?

- Did/does your child patch at school (particularly if your child is elementary school age)? Did patching at school present any problems?

- If your child is done patching, what are the results? Do your child's eyes see equally and work together? Do you still need to watch for relapses?

I'm looking forward to learning about others' experiences!

[ett]

DS1 did patching from ages 3.5 to 6. He started out with 1 hr/day and when the vision in his weak eye wasn't getting better, we went to 2 hrs/day. That's when things started to improve and by age 6, the vision in both eyes was about the same so we stopped patching and went to glasses. I think we did do glasses and patching at the same time, while he was still getting used to the glasses. Things have remained stable so we haven't had a need to go back to patching. We have appts. every 6 months to make sure the vision is staying equal. Since the max. length we've done is 2 hrs/day, DS1 never had to patch during school hours.

[Gena]

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Any else?

[HIU8]

DN did the patching for about a year. It was only 4 hours a day to start moving down to 2 hours and then one hour. She doesn't do it anymore. She would only wear the bandaid patch, not the one over her glasses, and she could put it on herself at age 3. It seems to have worked.

[gatorsmom]

I can't answer all your questions so I'll tell you simply about our experience. We started patching Sisi's eyes when she was 9mo and quit at 2yo. The first pediactic opthamologist recommended this because of her wandering eyes (can't remember what that his called). It did help- even I noticed that she did it less after patching for about 2 hours a day for the first year and then 4 hours per day. Honestly, she had a hard time with it. For about 6 months, she did great and left the patch on. After that she would pull it off unless we distracted her for the full 2 hours. Not easy at that age and with her twin running around trying to pull her patch off too! At 2yo we started seeing another ped opthamologist twice he said we could continue the patching but there was really no need. She can control the wandering when she wants to. She is near sighted and so prefers one eye to the other and lets the weaker one drift when focusing on far objects but up close her eyes both focus on the object she's looking at. Eventually she'll need glasses for her nearsightedness but right now more patching wont change much.

I will tell you if you ever go to adhesive eye patches that the Cured patches are very, very sticky. One ripped off part of Sisi's eyebrow when I tried to take it off. We liked the Nexcare eye patches of the 3 or 4 brands we tried. hth!

[Jenny_A]

I haven't read the responses. Here is my experience: DD is 4 and has been patching for 9 months now. She wears a felt patch that slips onto her glasses. She wears it on average for 2 to 3 hours a day. It's hard to get her to wear it more. We've seen a big improvement in the strength of her weak eye. We are at the end now and she sees 20/30. We are trying to get it to 20/20 but the improvement has slowed way down. The doctor said if it stayed 20/30, that's okay, but if she has still made no improvement he is going to try eye drops that blur the vision in the good eye. We go back in a month to check her vision again.

Good luck, it's a lot of work, but worth it. It does work!