When is it too late for me to go through surgery for intermittent exotropia?

Thanks very much for your enquiry. Generally speaking, I would advise LASIK before any squint/strabismus surgery. This is because there is a risk that changing the spectacle power of the eye (via LASIK) may make the intermittent exotropia more obvious if a patient finds it harder to ‘fuse ‘ the images from each eye after LASIK. If so, the strabismus surgery can then address the full effect and magnitude of the squint. Ideally, if strabismus surgery is required, it would be performed at least a month after LASIK surgery when the vision and spectacle power has usually stabilized.

Strabismus or squint is a misalignment of the the eyes. The commonest type in our community is what you child has: intermittent exotropia (XT). In general this is a more benign type of squint compared to its opposite which is esotropia. In intermittent XT usually the eyes take turns deviating outwards, with the one that turns out more often risking becoming more "lazy". But on the contrary, patching is done on the eye that is LESS deviated i. e.