‘Our daughter was born with no eyes - our world shattered, but our lives changed for the better’

ok.co.uk:

When Laura held her newborn daughter Margot, she knew something was wrong and her mother’s instinct kicked in. “Margot was born at 8.45pm.

At around 3am I was holding her while my husband John was asleep. Everything had been so chaotic, it was the first time we were on our own in peace and I could have a proper look at her,” she says. “We’d been aware she’d not opened her eyes, but that isn’t wholly unusual for a newborn.That particular aspect of Margot hadn’t troubled me.

But then, as I was looking at her, I could see her eyes were quite sunken. It was the sinking that really worried me.” After voicing their concerns, Laura, 37, and John, 33, were referred to an emergency eye clinic where Margot underwent examinations. “We didn’t know this at the time, but Margot’s eyelids were fused together.They used tiny metal clamps to prise her eyelids open,” recalls Laura, a school administrator. “John had to hold her while they did it.

I remember sitting there in floods of tears because she was screaming.They couldn’t get her eyes fully open and we were referred to a specialist ophthalmologist.” After four days of worry, Laura and John received the diagnosis that their second child (they already had a daughter, Bernadette) had been born without eyes due to a condition called bilateral anophthalmia, meaning her eyes and optic nerves hadn’t developed in the womb.The condition affects just one in 100,000 babies. “It feels like an awful thing to say, but it was so traumatic.The night before we found out we both said that we thought something was wrong.