A rare birth defect called Anopthalmia hit a male baby from Mesa, Arizona. The infant, Richie Lopez, was born in October 2013 without eyeballs.

Anopthalmia, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is the total absence of eye tissue or apparent absence of the globe.

At first, Kelly Lopez, the mother of Richie, thought it was just normal for a newborn not to open his eyes immediately. However, when 13 days passed and her child still had not opened his eyes, she had him checked, reports AZcentral.com.

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The infant underwent an MRI at the Banner Desert Medical Center where the staff thought the baby's face was swollen at birth. Tests results shocked the Lopezes who learned that there were no eyeballs under Richie's closed eyelids.

"I think we were in shock, obviously very upsetting," shares Lopez. "The first thought through your mind is, how did this happen and how was it even not caught?"

Fortunately, a ray of hope shone on the family when the doctor said that Richie has an optic nerve, which opens the possibility that the child could still see in the future. To prepare the infant for a possible eye transplant in the future, the doctors sutured expanders in his eye socket with the hope that it would grow and hold prosthetic eyes, reports KTV3.

However, the baby recently lost the eye expanders when he rubbed his eyes, but Kelly was able to replace the right expander, although the left one is missing. Richie is now enrolled in a program for blind babies and looks cool wearing baby sunshades.

In 2014, another baby with the same birth defect was born in Denver, Colorado.

According to Daily Mail, the defect is an extremely rare condition with an incidence of 0.22 for every 1,000 live births based on a prospective study of 50,000 newly born infants. In England, a recent study found it affected one out of every 10,000 births.

TagsArizona, blind baby, baby with no eyes, no eyeballs, anopthalmia, birth defect