When mother Guadalupe Martinez took her newborn daughter, Kimberly, from the nurse’s arms, she knew something was wrong.
Her daughter’s left eye didn’t look quite normal. It “looked like she’d been punched,” Martinez recalls. “Her face was swollen. She didn’t look right.”
Martinez, of course, still dearly loved her new daughter. But after a perfectly healthy pregnancy and a smooth birth via C-section, Martinez couldn’t understand what had gone wrong and altered her daughter’s appearance in such a way.
The nurses said Kimberly’s eyelids just needed some more time to properly develop and fully separate; it was a minor development problem that could easily be fixed with a simple procedure.
When doctors ran an ultrasound to confirm the condition of Kimberly’s eye, however, they realized that it wasn’t just a problem with Kimberly’s eyelid.
Her left eye wasn’t even there.
Kimberly’s left eye had never formed. Instead, a cyst had taken its place and was now surrounding the pepper-seed-sized eye, which didn’t have a chance to properly develop.
Kimberly was diagnosed with anophthalmia, a medical condition where either one or both of a child’s eyes don’t properly develop during pregnancy.
Although the doctors confirmed there was a cyst growing in the place of Kimberly’s left eye, they chose not to remove it – at least not for the time being.
Kimberly’s skull was still forming and removing the cyst now would cause her skull to collapse on itself. The cyst was helping her skull retain its proper shape.
The Martinez family had no choice but to wait for Kimberly to grow older, so the situation could be properly handled.
After one month, Kimberly’s eyelid finally separated, and five months after that, doctors finally completed the operation that removed the cyst.
In its place, they fitted an eye expander, a clear ball that absorbs fluid from surrounding tissues to expand as the child wearer grows.
Now two years old, Kimberly is old and has grown enough to be fitted with a prosthetic eye. She has adapted incredibly well – though her lack of sight does cause her to be more accident-prone than other children.
She is, though, a happy and healthy child. Her three older brothers all dote on her and are incredibly protective of their baby sister, defending her from stares of callous strangers.
Their mother is extremely grateful to her sons, but realizes that there’s little they can do about the strangers. “So long as we love [Kimberly], that’s all that matters,” she said.
