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POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. (KFVS) - A Bootheel family received a devastating diagnosis just days after their daughter’s birth.

It is not an easy story to tell, but the Ice Family wanted to share it with all of us.

As of Friday February 9th, 2024, Taylor Ice gave us an update on her daughter Wrenley’s surgery to unseal her eyelids.

Because Wrenley’s eyelids were too small surgery did not go as planned requiring doctors to improvise and experiment. She said it went well.

The family will be going back for another appointment on February 16th to make sure she’s healing.

Back on February 5th Robert and Taylor Ice told us the birth of their daughter Wrenley caused them to see their love story and her young life through a different lens.

“One of our co-workers had said he’d had a crush on me,” Taylor said.

Robert added, “I seen her. It’s like, ‘Okay, this is nice.’ It’s like love at first sight.”

Through the eyes of Taylor and Robert Ice, love found its way to their hometown of Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

Taylor remembered the day Robert asked her to marry him.

“So it was Christmas Day, I’m getting to the last gift, and I open it up and it’s a photo album and the cover picture is the picture of the ring and then I look up and he’s on one knee.”

But Robert had to make sure the ring fit beforehand.

“One night when she was sleeping, I decided to try it on her. It started getting stuck on her and I had to twist it off her without waking her up and finally I got it off of her and she woke up and was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m just like, ‘Uh, getting stuff ready for work.’”

But after saying I do, the next steps would not be easy.

Taylor dreamed of starting a family, but struggled getting pregnant.

“You know we were just kind of like, ‘If it happens it happens.’”

A year later, it finally did. A positive pregnancy test...or five.

Taylor was filled with joy.

“I look at it, and go, ‘Babe! Babe!’ and he’s like, ‘What?’,” Taylor recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Look at this,” and he’s like, ‘It’s faint.’”

But Taylor told her husband it did not matter if the pregnancy test was faint.

“And so on my lunch break, I got four more. I got the digital ones,” she said.

Robert too remembered this day clearly.

“I received a text message of a photo that had several, several pregnancy tests that were positive and said, ‘Okay, I’m in shock.’”

That shock would soon turn into excitement and regular checkups, along with ultrasounds, genetic testing and Taylor being told she had a perfectly healthy baby.

She went to an appointment to get checked out, and soon enough it was time for her to have her baby.

Baby Wrenley Ice was born 6 pounds 10 ounces.

Taylor recalled how special it was.

“When I heard her, I just burst into tears. I mean hearing her--it was just perfect.”

However, the happiest day of her life would quickly take a confusing turn.

“I did notice she wasn’t opening her eyes, so I had asked the nurse,” Taylor said. “Well in the womb it’s dark, so they normally don’t open their eyes right away.”

But Wrenley never opened her eyes.

“The pediatrician’s going over the baby and he just like stops with his examination and looks up at us and says, ‘Your daughter doesn’t have any eyes,’ and said it so bluntly, and I just looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean they’re small?’,” Taylor recalled. “He goes, ‘No, they aren’t there,” and I just burst into tears because I just couldn’t fully process what that meant at the time.”

Wanting answers, the family would go to the Children’s Hospital in St. Louis the same day after Taylor’s c-section where they would spend nine long days, hoping to receive answers.

This process was not easy for both parents.

“It was for me confusing, because one diagnosis lead to another diagnosis, which was actually inside that diagnosis--it was just a lot to take in at one time,” Robert said. “So each time we got a new diagnosis, and we were just researching.”

The doctors determined Wrenley was born without any eye tissue, without an optic nerve and does not produce a stress hormone called cortisol.

Her eyes sealed shut.

But the medical team still did not understand why, so they called in Geneticist Doctor Nate Jensen to uncover something he had never come across.

“This is an incredibly rare condition, there’s less than thirty cases described in the world,” he said.

A closer look at baby Wrenley’s genetics revealed a disorder called PRR-12.

“In PRR-12 disorder there’s a spectrum of how patients are affected by it,” Dr. Jensen explained. “Some patients with the same gene change have one eye affected and it might be totally absent like in Wrenley’s case, or it might just be smaller, and in this case, both of the eyes are affected and both are completely absent.”

Dr. Jensen said research for this condition is incredibly limited, but it could impact Wrenley developmentally and intellectually.

He also said there is a 50 percent chance Wrenley could pass this disorder on.

But if Taylor’s pregnancy was healthy, how did this get missed?

“There’s nothing Wrenley’s mother or father did to cause this, there’s nothing either could’ve done to prevent it--it’s totally random,” Dr. Jensen said.

It was a totally random occurrence.

“I mean we had a better chance of winning the Powerball,” Taylor said.

But for these new parents, they said they won the jackpot.

“It’s kind of like the whole world in your hands,” Robert said as he looked at Wrenley. “In the long run, I feel it was us who was chosen to help her out along the way and that we would learn from her as well.”

Robert and Taylor are experiencing life in a way they could have never imagined.

“Well everybody, they learn through vision--they learn by seeing things--so with her, she’s going to have to learn how to feel her surroundings and smell her surroundings,” Taylor said.

Which Wrenley is already doing, being tucked away with one of mom and dad’s shirts each night.

“It’s hard for us to visualize what life would be like if we could not see. If someone took my vision, I’d be devastated,” Taylor said. “But for her--because I know what vision is, I’ve lived with it my whole life--but for her this is just her normal.”

If you would like to learn more about Wrenley and her family’s situation, you can visit their GoFundMe page here.