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Strabismus.
My Crossed Eyes
Strabismus,
Are you looking at me?,
Coping Mechanisms,
Do You Use Both Your Eyes? Take this Online Test,
Fresh Perspective,
John Hopkins Eye Clinic, Look Pa-No Depth Perception, Still the Odd Girl, Sucking at Sports
Growing up with crossed eyes is an interesting experience to say
the least. I was born on April 4th with a birth defect, strabismus. It’s
a condition in which the eyeballs are not aligned properly and point in
different directions. My parents didn’t notice it right away but within the year
they did and we started the process of trying to fix this condition:
- We patched my eye.
- And I had three operations
when I was very young to correct my strabismus. I always said I had one
surgery when I was one; one when I was two; and one when I was three. My
earliest memories are of falling down the stairs and vague flashes of
being alone in a hospital room. And I do have a brief memory of being wheeled
away from my mother on a gurney, crying and screaming for her and hearing
my mother crying and yelling for me. In those days, they weren’t as good
at keeping children and parents together.
- I was lucky enough to go to a
really good hospital. We lived in Maryland and were able to have my
surgery done at John Hopkins. The strabismus surgeries consisted of weakening the
muscles of the stronger eye with the hopes that the muscles would become
close enough in strength and that the eye sight would click into place and
the patient would start seeing with both eyes at the same time. Mine
never did.
So I grew up and went through school with strabismus. Every
child has challenges and I weathered it pretty well. Of course, I got teased -
all the usual. “Cross Eyes”; “Four Eyes”.
And of course, I sucked at sports; volleyball and baseball were the worst. I remember the old “Keep your eye on the ball”. And I would, I kept my eye on the ball and swung and every time it went right past me. And when by some weird chance I hit the ball, I was shocked. People yelled at me a lot when it came to sports. And of course when I was in the outfield, I was scared as hell because I got hit by the ball so many times. I tried to catch it I just didn’t know where it was. There was even a time after I was an adult, my boyfriend, who was a very good baseball player threw a baseball to me. It hit me in the face - it wasn’t the first time I’d been hit with a ball. He felt horrible and kept saying “I’ve never met anyone who when I threw a ball right to them, couldn’t catch it.” I explained that I didn’t have any depth perception. It’s interesting that neither I nor my parents realized I didn’t have any depth perception until I was in my teens. The doctors never warned us about it.
It seems I’d developed a lot of coping mechanisms for my strabismus which I didn’t even know I had, I just did some thing without thinking about them. Like touching the edge of a step before stepping on the next stair and using my finger and sound to gauge when my glass of water was getting full.
For
More Coping Mechanisms Click Here. To explain why I was always running into
things, I used the old stand-by about dancers. “You know how clumsy dancers are
when they’re not dancing. They can dance but they can’t walk”. And sports -
I just sucked at sports that’s all.
It was my father who discovered I didn’t have any depth perception. I’d was lighting candles at church with one of those long candlelighters with a taper to light the candles and I always had a hard time doing it. I would simply hope the candle would light and if I tried to many times , I’d cheat and tap the taper on the top of the candle and move it over to the wick. My dad saw me readjusting when I got close to the wick and gave me a little test after church.
Here’s an online test that you can take to see if you are using both eyes.
Then when we figured out I didn’t have depth perception, we took me to the doctor at which point they said “Well, of course, she doesn’t have depth perception that's often the case with strabismus. We can’t fix the depth perception issue because she’s too old and the mind has decided how she sees things but we can do more surgery to make it look as though she has straight eyes cosmetically.
That’s when we went to John Hopkins, Wilmer Eye Institute. When I went there at 18 for two additional surgeries, there was an entire wing devoted to strabismus. They are wonderful people. Expert knowledge, friendly, warm and are more helpful than I can describe. The surgeries and therapies that are being used to fix people with crossed eyes has improved dramatically over the years and continues to change. So they fixed my eyes so that when my vision is corrected my eyes are pretty close to straight.
Still, if my vision is uncorrected or I’m really tired one of my eyes (the one I’m not primarily using to focus) turns in. And I look into the mirror and see that odd girl that people said (and still occasionally say)
“Are you looking at me?”.
What do you say to that?
When I was young. I just looked away and would shy away from looking at anyone for the rest of the evening. These days I say something like “My eyes don’t work together. One eye is looking at you. The other has wandered off in search of life on other planets”. When I was young, I was convinced this one thing made me ugly and completely unattractive. I still have days like that but it’s less constant than it used to be. And now I’m lucky enough to have a husband and some friends that will tell me I’m attractive.
And fortunately, I was once given a fresh perspective by an artist friend of mine. I can’t find the exact picture he was referring to but he talked about an optical device used by artists in painting where both eyes would not be focused on the same spot. They were attempting to give their artistic renderings a larger life than the simple two dimensions of a space. And he said that the picture reminded him of me because my eyes weren’t straight and that “I was art”. It was amazing to me that anyone could see my eyes in a beautiful light. And while, it’s hard to keep that compliment in my consciousness, just having heard it - having someone tell me that my eyes were beautiful, not in spite of the fact that they were turned, but because they were turned. That gave me a new perspective. That was a gift I will never loose. Just having heard that once, changed my world.
Some other perspective changers on Strabismus.
It's a list of famous people with this eye condition.
A great blog for people with lazy eye. Lots of support.
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