When Kelly Lopez gave birth to her baby boy after a normal pregnancy and ultrasound, she didn't think anything of her son Richie's closed eyes.
At first hospital staff thought Richie wasn't opening his eyes because his face was just swollen. Almost two weeks later she learned through an MRI that there were no eyes under her newborn baby's eyelids, reported 3TV, a local news network.
Lopez's son has a condition called Anophthalmia, which is defined as the absence of the globe and ocular tissue from the orbit, according to Medicine Net.
"I think we were just in shock. Obviously very upsetting," she told 3TV. "The first thought through your mind is, how did this even happen and how was it not even caught?"
Doctors put expanders in Richie's eye sockets when he was seven weeks old to allow them to grow so one day he can have prosthetic eyes put in. The expanders were held in with sutures, but between feeds and burpings the baby knocked them out. Lopez called a surgeon at 2 a.m. when the expanders were knocked out and they were later reinserted.
"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," Lopez recalled to 3TV.
Richie now dons a pair of baby sunglasses to protect his eyes and to protect him from insensitive comments from people in public.
More recently doctors told the family that Richie still has an optic nerve in his eye, which means that one day he may be a candidate for an eye transplant so he can see for the first time.
Though the condition is rare, another baby named Chet Oliver Smith was born last year in Denver, Colo. without any eyes.
