White dots in her eyes signified cancer
“It showed up a couple times in pictures of Maycie. Instead of red eye, she had white. Then we noticed it every once in a while when she was in the bathtub or in her high chair. We thought it was a reflection from the white of the tub or the white of her high chair tray. But then it got to where her eyes kind of seemed empty. It was really strange. So we took her to a pediatrician. She told us there was an absence of a red reflex, and that we needed to go to Texas Children’s Hospital the next day.
“Maycie was diagnosed with bilateral retinoblastoma, which is cancer of the retina in both eyes. She was 11 months old. I was devastated. The tumors in her right eye were not in the optic nerve yet, but they were too close. They didn’t want it to spread to her brain. So the best course of treatment was to remove the right eye and try to save the left eye.
“Believe it or not, it’s day surgery. Her right eye was removed on October 24, 2002, which was our fourth wedding anniversary. She came home, slept half the day, and then she was up and playing. At first, we were pretty optimistic about the other eye. For about a year and a half, we tried to save it. We did six months of chemotherapy. We did laser therapy. We did cryotherapy. She had 28 days of radiation. But in the end, we couldn’t save it.
“I worked at a daycare at the time. Maycie would sit up against the wall and isolate herself, not wanting to be around people. If anyone would get near her, her first instinct was to bite. So she had a little harder time after the second eye was removed. When they’re that age, though, they’re pretty resilient. She bounced back. She ended up getting prosthetic eyes.
“But it was hard not to keep thinking, if only we had known the signs. Those white dots in her eyes in all the pictures screamed cancer, letting us know that something was terribly wrong. We just didn’t know the signs of retinoblastoma, and we sure didn’t know she probably had it since birth.
“Some days, the guilt that consumes me is mentally and physically crippling. I know it’s not my fault. I know there’s no way I could have known. But that doesn’t help. What does help is knowing I have spread awareness of retinoblastoma, so that it might possibly help someone else.”
— Brandi Gonzalez
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