Eyes/ Re: a plea for the group

[Guest guest]

Hi Jeannie,

Thank you for sharing your story. Yes, it is EXTREMELY important for our

children with JRA to have their eyes and vision monitored regularly!

This illness itself can sometimes cause blindness, even when the joints

are in apparently good shape and their arthritis doesn't seem noticeably

active. And some of the medicines commonly used to treat JRA can also

have negative affects on our children's eyes, prednisone and plaquinel

especially. Thank you for this reminder. My son Josh will be seeing his

eye doctor on Monday. I've looked up a post I sent last year, regarding

these same issues. I'll repost it right after this one, as it may be of

some comfort to you as you prepare for your son's surgery. Please send

us an update soon, to let us know how it goes. You'll both be in my

thoughts.

Take care,

Georgina

Jeannie Valera wrote:

>

> Hi everyone,

> altough I haven't posted for quite some time, I have been faithfully

> reading the digest daily. I just wanted to remind the parents to

> make

> sure that you keep seeing an eye dr for your children. My son,

> (9) was diagnosed with systemic jra 2 years ago and we

> aggresively treated with steroids. It has taken alot of ups & downs

> to try to make it managable for him. He was pulled off the iv

> treatments of steroids in 3/00 due to the side effects as well as his

> sed rate was going down. In may we went on enbrel and are doing

> pretty good(beside a wierd flare/virus he went through in july).

> When

> we came back from vacation in august he ws complaining about blurred

> vision and not wanting to wear his new glasses. we already had an

> appointment set up with the eye doc(we see every her every 6-12 weeks)

> and found out that his right eye had developed a fully mature

> catarac. This was on monday(8/21) and tomorrow he is having surgery

> to have it removed. to make a long story short I implore everyone

> whoose kids are on steroids make sure that you continue to have their

> eyes check an a regular basis. We did know a year ago that he had

> the

> start of it but our dr said she was surprised how quickly it got

> worse(5 weeks since our last visit). they are trying to get this one

> quickly before the other eye starts to get worse. well sorry to

> ramble on. I hope for all our children that we are able to get tthem

> to be comfortable and able to beat this disease.

> Thanks for listening Jeannie