Twenty-Ten

While doing a few bits of shopping we saw some assistants drumming up business for the opticians. I’ve been meaning to book Ms R in for an eye test, not because I expect her eyesight to be anything other than perfect but because if she was at school she’d have one. I also quite like the idea of collecting ‘evidence’ of her welfare should we ever need to make a report to the LA. So we enquired about childrens eye-tests, got invited in, gave away all of their personal information and then added my signature to an NHS form. Ms R was feeling a bit unsure about it all but the optician was really nice, she sat and looked in a machine at a picture of a house while he measured her prescription and then went into another room where she identified all of the letters of the hang-up thing almost down to the bottom. Whilst I realise it was an eye-test it was also a pretty good test of her letters and she was amazingly unfaltering naming all the letters by name except for the ‘u’ which she sounded phonetically. She was also shown a board with various sized writing on it and could identify letters even from the smallest font. Apparently her vision is absolutely perfect.

The optician explained that he didn’t have the full range of equipment for eye-testing a three year old but he could do a basic one if we liked. We did like so he started off by writing a few letters in large thick writing on a piece of paper and asking Master R to trace them with his finger. Then he pointed at the letters on the hang-up and asked Master R to point to the matching one on his piece of paper. I was absolutely amazed, he has had far less contact with letters than dd has and I know that he couldn’t identify or name any of them but he was quite able to match the far away ones with the close ones. Until, that is, the optician started pointing at the smaller ones. Ms R bounced up and down beside him stroking his thigh and saying "Come on, you can do it"…but he couldn’t. She then expained to the optician that he could really but he was just shy. Then we looked at the close up board and he couldn’t match letters from the medium sized fonts. He just sat there quietly looking but not pointing or speaking. Ms R kept telling us he could see them really and he was just teasing us but when the optician pointed at larger font letters he matched them pretty quickly. We then sat him in front of the machine (with the picture of the house inside of it) and he looked into that managing to stay very still as required. The optician explained that according to the machine he is long sighted in one eye and short sighted in the other eye, meaning one eye (the right, I think) is doing all the work. He held a pen in front of Master R and alternated covering each eye, when he asked Master R which was clearer the answer corresponded with the machines diagnosis. So he’s written a letter that we need to show our lovely GP in order to get a referral to someone more specialised. Ms R took this all very personally and we did the rest of the shopping with her shouting loudly at me to not give the letter to our doctor and that she wasn’t going to let me take her brother to hospital. I’ve explained to her the best I can about what may happen and what the worst case scenario may be (eye patch to correct laziness and glasses to help with short sightedness) but speaking on his behalf she is pretty determined that he does not want an eye patch. But if he has glasses she wants some too.

He was a very nice optician from Singapore (so looked about twenty years younger than he probably was) and told us about his new baby (I do love Singaporeans). When Ms R told him that they weren’t going to school he smiled and said "Ah, you’re being home educated".

I’m not really concerned about Master Rs possible sight issues. As things are at the moment it doesn’t seem to be affecting him in that he can happily watch television, really enjoys looking at books and always points things out in the pictures, manages to get anything food related into his mouth and has great co-ordination and balance. But I’m aware that if he was really having difficulty with the smaller letters then without help things like reading would never get beyond the earliest reader books with the largest writing. I can picture a scenario in my head of a four or five year old child starting school with undiagnosed short sightedness, not getting very far with any of the academic stuff so standing out as being not too bright and then misbehaving because of boredom and earning more labels, I wonder how often this happens. Thankfully even if nothing can be done to help Master R (which I’m sure it can) we can adjust anything and everything necessary to make things easier.

My concerns are more with how Ms R is dealing with it. While I’ve explained that there is nothing wrong with Master R and that he doesn’t have a problem with his eyes she still can’t get passed using those two words loudly in reference to him. This I’m sure could be more damaging than not being able to read the small letters.