blocked tear ducts

[ellymae]

my 19 month old DD is still suffering with a block tear duct in one eye. Is there a chance that it might sort itself out or will we will need to seek medical help at this stage?

[beeper]

They ususally say it self resolves by 1. This is all I know, there has been other threads about this if you do a search.

[ellymae]

thanks beeper. I had a look through previous threads a while ago but most seem to be about babies who were a bit younger than mine.

All I've heard is that 95% of babies outgrow the problem by 1, and of those left another 95% outgrow it by 2! I've tried massaging under her eye but perhaps haven't been dilligent enough. Unfortunately, she suffers from an unrelated medical condition and food allergies so to date a blocked tear duct has been low on my list of priorities but I'm getting to the point where perhaps we should be trying to get it sorted out

[beeper]

I would only let my ds's have surgery as a last resort, I had eye surgey as a 9 year old and it was not pleasant. Do what you can, you could wait till 2.5 and go from there just to give that extra time. I hope it does reslove as my DS2 had a sticky eye for 6 weeks and we thought that was a blocked duct, but he weed in his eye accidently and it cleared up lol.

[ellymae]

I'm definitely not keen on surgery either and am more inclined to leave things to nature. I just wondered by this age if it was unlikely to clear up by itself. I'm not sure I could get away with syringing in some wee to the offending eye now!!

[geekgirl]

my dd2 had the surgery for it (actually, she had about 4 surgeries for it ) - the first one is very minor, I guess the GA is the only issue. All they do is basically flush it through or push a v. soft, thin tube through it to open it up - it's usually blocked by a very fine membrane. It's not like they're operating on the eye itself.

Dd2 had some structural issues with the actual tear ducts so unfortunately needed more surgery, but that's v. rare.

Have you tried massaging it etc. to open up the membrane?