2-year-old Melanie Dickerson was born with Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome, due to which she has abnormalities in the anterior wall of the eye.
This is a fairly rare hereditary disease that occurs in one in 200 thousand newborns.
Because of this anomaly, Melanie's pupil occupies almost the entire front of her eye, giving the girl both charmingly cute, like cartoon characters, but also a little frightening.
Melanie is very lucky, as half of the children with Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome have glaucoma, and many also have deafness. For Melanie, at first glance, all anomalies are contained only in a very large and light-sensitive pupil, and so far all her troubles are bypassed by the need to wear sunglasses.
According to the girl's mother Karina Martinez, many passers-by are very frightened by her appearance. The girl's eyes probably remind people of the eyes of aliens or popular characters in urban legends - children with black eyes. But Karina herself considers her daughter's eyes very beautiful.
When Melanie was born, no one noticed anything unusual in her eyes. But the older the girl got, the more people began to notice that her pupils are very large and because of them, the white part is almost invisible in Melanie's eyes. It also became clear that Melanie's eyes were starting to hurt in bright light and she needed to wear safety glasses.
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Then the doctors diagnosed Melanie with Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome and scared her parents that the girl had a 50% chance of developing glaucoma. But while Melanie's eyesight is all right, possibly due to the fact that at the age of 5 months she underwent surgery on time and corrected the channels in which excess fluid accumulated.
With age, little Melanie increasingly attracts attention because of her unusual pupils. Her mother hopes that her daughter will not have problems communicating with peers in the future, because children will immediately notice that her eyes are different from theirs.
Now Karina Martinez has found 40 people with a similar syndrome via Twitter and is trying to get advice from them on how to live with such an anomaly in order to avoid vision problems.