"Current technology and chemotherapies can save the baby's life and vision. "When caught early it's very treatable," Stewart said. Stewart says catching retinoblastoma early is key.
It turned out to be our worst nightmare but it saved our son's life." "Our lives went from normal to cancer, to a cancer survivor in three weeks. "If we did not get this eye out, the cancer would spread to his blood and to his brain," Fitzgerald told ABC. "It's much better to do an exam that has negative findings than to pass up an exam and not have it looked at."īecause 75% of Avery's eye was covered in tumors, doctors had to remove the eye, ABC reported. "A lot of photos taken will show one or both pupils are white and subsequently an eye exam discloses that it's a normal eye," Stewart told USA TODAY Network. Stewart said while it's "absolutely safe" for parents to use a camera flash to see if a child has white pupils, "it's in no way a perfect predicator of retinoblastoma." Stewart, professor and chair of Ophthalmology, at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. One of the symptoms of the disease is a white color in the pupil when light is shined in the eye, according to Michael W. He was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare cancer that develops in the retina. Parents or other family members may often detect this abnormal pupil in children. Simply put, leukocoria means white pupil.
"His whole pupil was just white and that's when I knew."ĭoctors told Julie and her husband, Patrick, that 75% of Avery's eye was covered in tumors. Leukocoria occurs when the usually black pupil at the center of the eye is white or abnormally colored when direct light is shined on it. "I did not want to take the picture because I had this dreaded feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I took the picture and boom," Fitzgerald told WREX-TV.
She decided to try the camera test on Avery. Several months ago Julie Fitzgerald noticed strange spots in the back of her 2-year-old son's eye, but she initially thought it was nothing, WREX-TV reported.įitzgerald said she read an article about a woman who discovered a family member's cancer after noticing a camera flash caused white eyes instead of red eyes. Typically overexposed cellphone pictures are annoying, but an Illinois mom's camera flash helped save her toddler's life.
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