Claire's Eyes - Mystery Solved!

If you look at the photo of Claire in the picture at the top of our blog now, or the one below from Oct 2008, you may be able to see that her left eye is two different shades of brown, almost equally half and half - one side a lighter, almost grey brown if you see it in the right light. The other, the same dark brown that she has had since she was a baby. We actually only noticed the color change in May of this year, and then as any parent would started to research online the color change, and why it was happening in only one eye. We learned some scary things about childhood eye cancers where the eye changed color, tumors, and blindness. Gotta love self-diagnosis via the web.


So we made an appointment with her pediatrician, who said her eyes were just changing color and that her vision was fine, but then she recommended we still see a pediatric opthamologist just to be safe. I knew from my previous research into medical journals that brown eyes do not often change colors, and that by this point Claire's eye color should be what it will be as an adult.

After a month or two of procrastination, we took Claire to the specialist this week. We learned that when the iris is forming, it is first in two halves that come together in the womb, and that for some reason, one half of Claire's iris got dented, or bent, in development. Sometimes when that happens, the two halves of the iris never come together and the result is a "keyhole" where the pupil looks like it extends a bit into the colored iris. Claire's eye did come together, but the dent remained. The doctor described it like this - if you took a piece of paper and folded it, but then smoothed it out again, you would still see a dent or a place where the fold was. That never goes away.

I found this very scientific description online about when the iris is formed:
"The human iris begins to form during the third month of gestation. The structures creating its distinctive pattern are complete by the eighth month of gestation."

So, basically her eye is fine - vision is fine - but she has a "dent" in her iris that causes a color change. If she had blue or green eyes, the doctor said the color change would be quite dramatic, but with brown eyes it's almost a camouflage effect and harder to see. Which made me feel better, considering that she has had this since birth and we really just noticed it a few months ago. She is so active and never sits still, so sometimes it's hard to get her to look at you square in the face for more than a few seconds - that's my excuse anyway. But all is well - just wanted to report back on what we found out, and alleviate any stressful worries (my mom!).