An Arizona mother’s keen eye detected something might be amiss while studying photos she had taken of her infant son. Andrea Temarantz started seeing a glint in her son Ryder’s left eye caused by the flash of her cellphone, NY Daily News reported.
“I kind of chalked it up to my cellphone just being a crummy phone,” Temarantz told the Daily News. “It very well could have gotten so much bigger.”
The glint that Temarantz, 36, was actually seeing was caused by a rare cancer called retinoblastoma. Doctors confirmed Ryder’s diagnosis at his four-month check-up, and gave his parents two options: they could either remove his eye, or give him intravenous chemotherapy that may expose him to a greater risk of developing another cancer, the newspaper reported.
The family would later learn of a third option for Ryder, who also has Down syndrome. He could travel to New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for an intra-arterial chemotherapy session, which targets the affected blood vessel behind the eye through a 6-foot-long catheter entering through his groin. Patients undergo one session per month over a three month span, according to the report. Ryder is scheduled to undergo his second treatment in early February.