A Calgary mother is strongly urging all parents to take their little ones for an eye exam, starting when they’re babies, in light of her own daughter’s health battle.
Three-year-old Dallis Delarge was born with a rare childhood eye cancer called retinoblastoma, but it wasn’t caught until she was nearly two.
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During an eye exam, optometrist Jared Long spotted a tumour behind the girl’s eye. She was just shy of her second birthday.
Since then, the little girl has endured six rounds of chemotherapy. She has to fly with one of her parents to Toronto SickKids Hospital every six to eight weeks, for laser and local cryotherapy on the 13 tiny tumours she still has.
Her family struggles most with the fact her treatment could have been started sooner.
“Just knowing that cancer was there and I don’t know,” said Chantal Delarge. “I look back at all her pictures and I think, ‘oh my gosh, that could have been really bad if we didn’t catch it when we did.'”
She now knows you can actually see eye tumours in flash photos. They appear as a milky white spot. In baby photos of Dallis, that spot is obvious.
Now, Delarge is urging other parents to learn from her experience: if you see irregularities in a child’s photo, they need immediate medical attention.
Dallis is now a busy preschooler, though she is experiencing a bit of developmental delay either from the disease or her treatment.
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Her tumours are stable, and she is carefully watched for any signs her cancer has spread.
There is a greater risk of that as she gets older.
It’s recommended that children have their eyes examined starting at the age of six months and every year after until the age of 19. In Alberta the exams are covered by Alberta Health.
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