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Rajia Idris-Yamamoto
It all started when Rajia was walking down the street. She heard a little girl crying. The girl was lost. Picking her up and soothing her, Rajia made up her mind.
She was going to have a baby.
Until that moment, Rajia had her reasons for waiting. A native New Yorker, she was a physical education teacher in New York City before moving out to California and becoming an assistant account manager for a corporation. As a child, she had uveitis and later, at age 17, developed inflammatory glaucoma, a rare form of glaucoma. At age 27, she was legally blind and had had several surgeries.
“It was a frightening experience for me”, Rajia recalls. “All my support network, my friends and family, were back in New York. I lost my house and my job.”
Rajia didn’t give up, though. She had been a national champion in judo, and she carried that strength and tenacity into her new challenge. She had to relearn adaptive skills, enrolling in a school for the blind, which she found a very empowering experience. “I’ve really developed a tough skin,” she says, “having a disability.” Meeting other visually impaired people was also very helpful—it did not make her feel as alone.
She met and married her husband, Toshiro, who is also visually impaired. They love the active life—“We’re sports people!” – river rafting, adaptive skiing, long distance running. They ran San Francisco’s famous Bay to Breakers 10K run in 1995.
Something was missing, though. For many years, Rajia had wanted a baby but was afraid to have a child, because she needed so many eye drops and was afraid of the effects this would have on a baby. She was also concerned about the scarcity of literature on glaucoma medications and how they affect pregnancy. After finding that little girl, though, Rajia knew she had to try.
Rajia notified her eye doctor as soon as she found out she was pregnant. She was careful to work with her eye doctor to devise a medication plan that she felt comfortable with. “I didn’t feel comfortable taking some of the newer medications,” she said, “because there isn’t a lot of information about long-term effects.” Her eye doctor communicated and worked with her obstetrician throughout the pregnancy. To monitor her and her baby, she had a greater number of tests than usual—including a sonogram every month, brain scan and two tests of her amniotic fluid.
Rajia was especially careful to minimize the absorption of eye drops into her bloodstream by doing naso-lacrimal occlusion. “I was so paranoid”, she laughs, remembering, “that I held each eye for ten minutes! Sometimes I felt like it took the whole day to take my medications!” Towards the end of the pregnancy, labor was induced eleven days early because the glaucoma was becoming too severe, and she didn’t want to change the eye drops that she had been using. It was all worth it, though—she gave birth to a happy, healthy boy, Taro.
Taro is almost two years old now, and her number one priority. “I really want him to have a normal childhood,”she says. ”I don’t want him to feel like he’s missed out. Sometimes I feel like we’re overcompensating! ” She makes sure her son gets read to almost every day by going to libraries and the bookstore. They go swimming at the YWCA and have traveled to Japan and New York twice.
When asked if she had any advice she wanted to give to Gleams readers, Rajia’s answer was simple. “Take care of yourself. Eat right, and make sure you exercise. Regardless of whether you want to become pregnant or not, be comfortable with your eye doctor and the medications you take.”