My three year old has a chalazion on the outside of her eye on the bottom lid

[cheryld190]

Hi There,
My three year old daughter has had this chalazion on the outside of her bottom eye lid for almost 2 months now and with my GP's guidance, we have tried an oral antibiotic which did nothing, and then we tried a topical ointment which again did nothing so my GP referred me to children's eye doctor who was wonderful and he gave us tobradex to apply topically to the outside of her eye. It has now been two weeks since this new ointment and it has done nothing - my husband and I both work and it has been hard for us to commit to putting warm compresses on her eye as often as we need to and she absolutley dislikes it - it's very hard to accomplish. The chalazion since the beginning, has been pea sized and very very red - from time to time, it there has been what looks like little white heads surfacing but again did not come through - we have taken her to the swimming pool twice and both times her eye started to somewhat drain - is that somewhat safe with the chalazion opening up and being exposed to the chlorine etc.????? These times at the pool have been the only time the chalazion has somewhat opened up.
The eye doctor said that the next option to do is to schedule her in for surgery but I absolutely DO NOT want to do that if I can avoid it at all costs.
Is there any advice you can give me on anything else we can do/try to aviod sending her to surgery?
Thank you for your help!

[Vivian3]

I realize this is quite an old post, but what did you end up doing for your daughter?  Have her chalazia healed completely?  I currently have a 3yo daughter with a similar situation - 3 months and counting, but our eye MD wants to wait another 6 months before he'll consider surgery.  I don't want her to have surgery and general anesthetic, but I'm also concerned about her vision.  Of the 3 chalazia she has, 2 are approx pea sized, and one is smaller.  However the redness and amount of swelling changes, as do the sizes (they must periodically drain then refill) and I don't know if I should take her back again to the eye MD only to have him tell me he wants to wait longer...
Thanks in advance for any response!

[cheryld190]

Thank you very much for letting me know Dr. O- the more knowledge I have before sending her for surgery the better I feel about it.

[Ray T Oyakawa, MD]

The treatments you daughter has had usually do not help.  The main treatment in warm compresses.   A chalazion/stye is like a pimple and antibiotics prevent new ones but do not make them go away.  If this does not respond to warm compresses she DOES NEED SURGERY.  A large chalazion can cause astigmatism and lead to loss of vision at this age.

Dr. O.