“Incredibly Rare”: Parents Of Baby Born Without Eyes Say They Won The Jackpot

Taylor and Robert Ice dreamed of starting a family for quite some time. Although getting pregnant would take the couple a year, they couldn’t have been happier once it finally happened. Thankfully, the pregnancy itself wasn’t out of the ordinary. But then, when their little one finally arrived, they noticed something odd. Their daughter, Wrenley, wasn’t opening her eyes. This wasn’t too out of the ordinary at first. But then, soon enough, the doctor told them that their baby was born without eyes.

“He says, ‘Your daughter doesn’t have any eyes,’ and said it so bluntly,” Taylor recalls. “I just looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean? They’re small?’ He said, ‘No, they’re not there.’ I just burst into tears because I couldn’t fully process what that meant at the time.”

From here, Taylor and Robert went looking for more answers. This was far from simple. According to Robert, one diagnosis would lead to another. Finally, Dr. Nate Jensen, a geneticist, was able to give these determined parents the info they needed: Wrenley has PRR-12 disorder.

“In PRR-12 disorder, there’s a spectrum of how patients are affected by it,” Nate explains. “Some patients with the same gene change might have one eye affected, and it might be totally absent… or it might be just smaller. In Wrenley’s case, both of her eyes are affected, and both are completely absent.”

This disorder is incredibly rare — there are less than 30 cases worldwide. Still, Wrenley is expected to be able to live a happy life, just like many other blind folks do. For this little one, that includes getting surgery to unfuse her eyelids so spacers can be put in to allow her facial structure to develop properly. Eventually, when she’s old enough, she’ll get glass eyes. A GoFundMe has been made to help with medical costs.

As overwhelming as all of this has been for Taylor and Robert, they couldn’t feel more grateful for their child. In fact, they both agree that they feel like they were meant to raise Wrenley just as she was born.

“It’s kind of like the whole world in your hands,” Robert says of holding his baby. “In the long run, I feel it was us who was chosen to help her out along the way and that we would learn from her, as well.”

“It’s hard for us to visualize what life would be like if we could not see,” Taylor adds. “If someone took my vision, I’d be devastated because I know what vision is. I’ve lived with it my whole life. But for her, this is just her normal.”

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