- Check your photos or take new photos of your child.
- Because The Glow may not always show up, review or look back at family photos, especially where your child is looking at the camera.
- Make sure to take or use photos where the flash is turned on and the red eye reduction featured is turned off.
- Look for The Glow, a white, opaque, or yellow spot in the pupil of one or both eyes. If you see The Glow once, be alert, but if you see it twice in the same eye, be active.
- Ask an eye specialist—an optometrist or ophthalmologist—for a comprehensive eye exam, including a red reflex test. If you have photos of your child showing The Glow, bring them with you to your appointment.
- Help us spread the word, especially to parents of young children.
Because no child should go blind from a preventable eye disease.”
Believe it or not, most cases of retinoblastoma are found and treated because a parent noticed a glow in their child’s eye either in every day life or in a photograph. Parental intuition and action makes all the difference. This disease typically occurs in very young children, so while you’re taking all those photos of your baby, look back through them with an educated eye and make sure there is nothing unusual about your child’s.
Who knew that something as simple as admiring pictures of your beautiful baby could save their eyesight and their life? Let me be clear, retinoblastoma is rare, but it doesn’t hurt to know the signs. Detected early, it can be successfully treated, and there is no reason for it to rob your child of his or her eyesight or young life.
