Alexia's Story

   Alexia Isabel was born on March 1, 2007 at 37 weeks. From birth, Lexi has had a hard life. She stayed at the hospital for 20 days because she had an infection, she was not eating too well, and she had jaundice. Finally she was able to come home on her due date March 20th with mild jaundice and a little eye infection. The hospital set up an appointment with an ophthalmologist to make sure her eyes were Ok and the doctor said her eyes were fine. On her two month check up her pediatrician suspected something was different about Lexi. He noticed that she was not tracking. He referred us to another ophthalmologist to see if something was wrong. There the ophthalmologist diagnosed Lexi with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia and said there is nothing they can do and she would just have to live with it. I was in shock and in disbelief so I decided to get a second opinion from another doctor. The ophthalmologist I chose also diagnosed her again with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia and he too said that there is nothing they can do. She had to go through several tests including blood evaluations and a MRI to make sure that it was only the optic nerve that was affected and not her brain or anything else.

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   After a couple of years of just being told there is no cure and no treatment that could help Lexi I just dealt with the fact that Lexi will be visually impaired. Until one day I had came across an article in the El Paso Times that was about a sixteen year old boy from El Paso that has the same condition as my daughter. This boy was going to China to have stem cell injections to improve his vision. I was so excited and happy to hear that there is still hope that my daughter could have some vision. I then researched about this procedure and followed his story. I came across another article and video that convinced me to believe that stem cell treatment was not that far from coming to the United States, so I decided to wait until this treatment would be available in the U.S. in 2011. I tried to contact any doctors that could give me more information on this and unfortunately they had only bad news. The stem cell treatment they would offer would only be for patients with spinal cord injuries and they were going to use a different type of stem cell. So then I made the decision that my daughter and I will go to China in hopes for her to one day gain some vision.

This recording was made by Ivona Voice Test-to-Speech