But my daughter’s eye had to be patched.
A big part of Prader-Willi Syndrome is the hypotonia (weak muscles). This muscular imbalance doesn’t just mean difficulties with the big stuff, like walking. It affects all of her muscles, including her eyes.
So, the family learnt yet another fancy word: strabismus. No, it’s not the title of a recently discovered album of Genesis out-takes. (Thank God). It means squinting, and/or going cross-eyed.
And so, for a while, to correct this, she had to be a pirate.
The brightly-coloured patches were like giant plasters you were supposed to stick directly over the eye. But our pirate, despite a few pleading parlays on the subject, was having none of it. So we attached them directly to the glasses, with a generous overlap sticking up, to the side and below the frame, to prevent her from peering round the edges.
The patches are long gone. But because of Prader-Willi, our former pirate will always have an off-kilter perspective on life. It's just the rest of us that have to do the squinting now, to try and see things from her point of view.
Video is The Muppets - Shiver My Timbers (from Muppet Treasure Island)
