Richie Lopez, an infant born in Arizona, has no eyeballs, after contracting a rare disorder in the womb. When the hospital staff first saw the newborn Richie, they believed everything had gone smoothly with the delivery.
Kelly Lopez, the infant's mother, noticed the eyes of the infant had still not opened a few hours after birth. When an MRI was performed 13 days later, physicians discovered the boy's eyelids had not opened because he was born without eyeballs.
Surgeons at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona, implanted expanders in the eye sockets of Richie, when the infant was just seven weeks old. This could allow physicians to implant prosthetic eyeballs in the near future, or artificial eyes, when and if they are ever developed by researchers.
"I think we were just in shock. Obviously very upsetting. The first thought through your mind is, how did this even happen and how was it not even caught?" Lopez asked about her delivery.
Parents of young Richie still want to know what caused their baby to be born without eyeballs, and physicians are still uncertain. The condition is extremely rare, and is known to physicians as Anophthalmia.
Richie wears baby sunglasses when he goes out with his parents. The mother told reporters she has received several negative and insensitive comments about her baby's condition.
Young Richie rubbed the expanders out of his eye sockets on one occasion, and the family dog ate one of the devices. When both eye sockets pulled out at two in the morning, the mother had to re-insert the device by herself, guided by telephone instructions provided by a surgeon. Currently, just one expander is present in the infant.
"It was so emotional, but I knew I had to do it. I knew that he needed this and I had no other choice; we were going to get it back in," the mother told the press.
Richie is enrolled in specialized programs for the well-being of blind infants, and is happily playing with toys designed for babies with similar physical challenges.
Anophthalmia simply refers to an absence of eyeballs. The term is often used by physicians along with microphthalmia, the presence of just a small piece of eye material. In most cases of this disorder, some fragments of eye can be seen in CT or MRI scans. Just one out of 5,000 infants is born with this condition.
One advantage the young boy has is that optic nerves are present in each of his eye sockets. This might allow physicians to, one day, implant biological or artificial eyeballs in the boy, although no such operation is currently scheduled.
