By Marina Esplin-Jones It is every new mother's worst fear to find out something is wrong with her child. But for Mrs. Tina Evans Caines the nightmare was even worse.

She and husband Glenn didn't learn their baby girl had a rare eye disease until it was almost too late to save her from going blind.

Ariana was born with glaucoma, a disease in which fluid builds-up in the eyeball and causes impaired vision. It can lead to blindness if untreated.

Ariana is believed to be only the second child in Bermuda known to have the disease, which is extremely rare in the Western world.

Mrs. Evans Caines, an information officer for Government, said she always had a feeling something was not quite right with Ariana, who was born on October 14.

"Her eye always looked very cloudy and it had a blue haze to it,'' Mrs. Evans Caines said.

Ariana was also a very unhappy baby, cried a lot and was overly sensitive to light, she said.

However, the family doctor could find nothing wrong with the baby and thought her eyes were simply changing colour.

Mrs. Evans Caines and her husband Glenn, who heads the Prison Fellowship Bermuda, finally found out what was the matter with their second child after rushing her to hospital one night due to an unrelated urinary infection.

When Dr. M.S. Hamza, the Island's only eye surgeon, examined her while she was in King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, he knew right away she had the symptoms of glaucoma. Dr. Hamza's son is the only other child in Bermuda known to have glaucoma, Mrs. Evans Caines noted.

After tests proved positive, Dr. Hamza advised immediate medical treatment abroad. Ariana was eight-weeks-old and the surgeon had said diagnosis at seven-weeks-old was almost too late for a successful operation.

The family flew out the next week for Washington DC where Ariana underwent an operation on both eyes at the Children's National Medical Centre. Dr. Mohammed Jaafar cut across her cornea so trapped fluid could be released from her eyeballs into the proper canals.

The operation was a complete success and Ariana and her parents came back home on the weekend. Ariana's eye bandages and both her eye patches have already been removed.

"I just want everyone to know she's okay,'' said Mrs. Evans Caines, who is perhaps better known as local DJ Lady T.

She will need glasses for nearsightedness and could develop a lazy eye which would require a second operation, but the possibility of blindness no longer exists.

"She can see. She is much happier,'' Mrs. Evans Caines exalted. "I now realise how much pain she must have been in. She was so miserable.'' She said Dr. Jaafar had described the disease as: "The pressure in an eye builds up so much it inflates much like a basketball until finally the cornea rips.'' NEW LOOK -- Twelve-week-old Ariana, with mom Mrs. Tina Evans Caines and dad Mr. Glenn Caines, is a happier baby after an operation abroad to cure her of the rare and painful vision-impairing disease, glaucoma, which, due its rarity, wasn't diagnosed locally until it was almost too late to save her eyesight.