Marah

Hello, my name is Marah. I am 21 years old from Bethlehem, Palestine. I was diagnosed with Coats’ Disease in my left eye when I was six years old. Luckily, it was only on Stage 2 so I was treated quickly to prevent any progression of the disease. As I remember, I was treated with […]

Kaydn’s Story

Kaydn was born six weeks early, in May of 2018. He spent his first nine days in the neonatal intensive care unit in Sioux Falls, SD. Despite being born premature, Kaydn left the hospital completely healthy and spent the first six months developing normally, just as a child would. This all changed on December 19th, […]

James

I am a single mother with two sons and we are from the beautiful island of the Philippines. My younger son, James, has Coats’ Disease. James is 8 years old and it was only August 2019 last year (a few days before his actual birthday on the 25th), that my son informed me that he […]

Ciolacu

Hello, my name is Ciolacu and I live in the Republic of Moldova. I am a violinist. When I was 13 years old, I was practicing the violin and I closed my left eye. I realized that I could not see with my right eye. The next day, I went with my mother to the […]

Blake

My fiancé, Blake, was diagnosed with Coats’ Disease at a very young age. This led to Blake having his right eye surgically removed in 2000, at the young age of just eight years old. Since that surgery, Blake has had multiple glass eyes, as he (and his eye socket) grew.  Today, Blake is 27 years […]

Ashley

In June of 2019, at 15 years old, Ashley was diagnosed with Coats’ Disease in her right eye by Dr. R. Sisk at the Cincinnati Eye Institute. Ashley has undergone four laser surgery procedures. After her last procedure in November 2019, her test showed she has lost the far peripheral vision on the nose side. […]

Braydan

My son, Braydan, is nine months old. When he was just four months old, our world came to a screeching halt. At two months old, our pediatrician referred us to PT for  what she thought was torticollis. After three sessions with the PT, she referred us to an ophthalmologist following a hunch that something “was […]

Mason

This is our bright, bubbly, energetic, funny, joyful, and handsome son, Mason. When he was four weeks old, we started to recognize something seemed a bit off. He was not meeting developmental bench marks appropriate for his age and did not respond to us the way one would think a new baby would respond to […]

Uriel

Our journey with Coats’ Disease began in May of 2018. I had started noticing that my son’s eye would wander off, so I immediately took him to his pediatrician and she referred me to an eye doctor. The wait to get into the eye clinic was two months, as was the case for most of […]

Matthew

Saturday, October 12. It was a normal day and Matthew was playing. Adam, my husband and his dad, noticed for a split second that Matthew had a haze over his right eye, but after that we couldn’t really see it in different types of light. So, we played a game with Matthew by covering his […]