A young mother who had been eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first child, and had been told to expect a “completely healthy baby”, immediately raised concerns with medical staff after the birth upon noticing that her daughter wasn’t opening her eyes. Taylor Ice explained that she noticed her newborn, Wrenley, wasn’t opening her eyes. “I asked the nurse, and she told me, ‘Well in the womb it’s dark, they don’t normally open their eyes right away’,” the mother from Missouri told US news channel KFVS12. It was only when the pediatrician was carrying out health checks days later that they discovered Wrenley had a rare condition.Wrenley Ice was born without eyes due to a rare genetic disorder. Source: GoFundMe and KFVS”The pediatrician was examining the baby, and then he just stopped and looked up at us and said, ‘Your daughter doesn’t have any eyes… they are not there’,” Taylor and her partner, Robert, admitted that they couldn’t “fully understand what that meant” at the time. “I just burst into tears,” Taylor said.
Baby born with ‘rare’ genetic eye disorder
Wrenley was born without any eye tissue, without an optic nerve and doesn’t produce the stress hormone cortisol, with her eyes completely sealed shut. “It was confusing for me, because one diagnosis led to another diagnosis, which was actually inside that diagnosis—it was just a lot to take in at one time,” Robert said.Robert and Taylor Ice had no idea their daughter had PRR-12 until days after her birth. Source: KFVS
The genetic disorder PRR-12 is an “extremely rare” condition, with a genetic specialist informing the couple that there are less than 30 cases diagnosed in the world, which means that research is limited. There is reportedly a spectrum in which the genetic disorder affects individuals, and not all cases impact both eyes or has both completely absent — some simply have a smaller eye.
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Despite the surprise, the couple are determined for their daughter to live a full life “In the long run, I feel like it was us that were chosen to help her out along the way and we would learn from her as well,” Robert said.
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