After your baby is born, he needs your close attention to his health. As well as careful, gentle care of each part of the body and each organ. The baby's eyes are no exception. Your day should begin with the fact that you are using a cotton swab dipped in clean water to wash your baby’s face, including your eyes. A separate swab is taken for each eye. Observing these simple rules, you thereby maintain the hygiene and cleanliness of the eyes of your crumbs. But it happens that even in the maternity hospital you notice that the baby's eye is festering. Or this unpleasant symptom appeared in a baby under the age of one year. What to do and how to properly treat the eyes? Consider this topic in more detail.
The reasons why the eyes of a newborn are festering
There may be several reasons:
- Conjunctivitis;
- Dacryocystitis.
Conjunctivitis
Conjunctivitis may be the first reason that an infant has one or both eyes festering. You will recognize it right away: stuck together cilia, a reddened eyeball, and increased tearfulness. Conjunctivitis has several varieties:
- Adenovirus
- Allergic
- Herpetic
- Pneumococcal / Staphylococcal
- Gonococcal
- Diphtheria
The further development of events depends on the correct diagnosis of conjunctivitis. The doctor may prescribe treatment, or it may also give directions for taking tests for concomitant infections, as some types of conjunctivitis are accompanied by the main source of the child’s disease - infection.
Your task is to contact your local pediatrician as soon as possible. Haste here is important because if one of the baby’s eyes is infected, then there is time to prevent the second from becoming infected. When both eyes are infected, the child weakens the body, the temperature rises, and the disease brings him great discomfort and takes a lot of strength.
If the circumstances are such that you have to wait a long time for a doctor, you can give your child first aid.
Dacryocystitis
There is another reason when a baby's eyes fester. This disease is called dacryocystitis. It occurs when a child has mucus left in the ducts of the lacrimal canal / canals, which envelops the baby in the womb.
Under normal circumstances, she should freely exit the channel at the time of the first breath and the cry of the baby. If this does not happen, stagnation, a cork, and the canal become clogged. The child’s eye is not washed by tear fluid, since it cannot penetrate stagnation, and the path for pathogenic bacteria is open.
With dacryocystitis, the canal cleaning procedure, or probing, is most often performed.This procedure is performed under local anesthesia, and improvement comes almost immediately. After that, either drops are prescribed to consolidate the result, or ointment, or other medications that are right for your baby.
Treatment
If a newborn baby has a rotten eye, prepare a chamomile infusion and rinse his eyes and eyelids. The infusion is simple:
- Pour 1.5 tablespoons of chamomile pharmacy into a glass with a capacity of 200 ml and pour boiling water to the top. Cover with a lid or saucer, insist for about an hour. Then dip a cotton swab in the infusion and wipe the entire eye towards the baby’s nose. If the baby is less than three months old, do this procedure with great care, as the skin of the eyelids is too thin and you can inadvertently provoke hemorrhage of small vessels.
- Tea brewing. If the baby's eye is festering and this is conjunctivitis, then wipe his eyes with tea leaves. Make a strong infusion of tea, and gently wipe the baby’s eyes with a cotton pad.
All other drugs and various drops can be prescribed only by a specialist, and only in an individual age dosage.
If you notice that the baby’s eye is starting to fester, approach the treatment seriously and conscientiously, and recovery will not take long.
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