I was born with a lazy eye. Technically the medical term is amblyopia, and let’s be honest that term at least has less judgement to it. What’s the use in insulting my left eye? For those of you who are paying close attention, yes I’m hearing impaired on one side of my head, and visually Impaired on the other. In case you’re interested there are two reasonably important things that happen when you have a lazy eye. They’re in a bit of a chicken or the egg relationship. The muscles in my left eye never bothered being good at focusing on the same position as my right eye, so I get double vision. My brain learned to ignore the information it gets from my eye, since it’s confusing and unhelpful. Which, full circle, means that the muscles in that eye don’t get good feedback and look wherever they want, making the information worse and more ignored. Lather, rinse, repeat, as needed.
Here’s a list of interesting and entertaining vignettes:
There’s an amazing picture of me cousins and brother and I visiting Santa. I’m probably 3. My cousin is on Santa’s Lap, and I’m at his knee, and it looks like I’m giving Santa this “What you talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” side-eye. It’s actually just late in the day, and my eye is just bonkers.
Doctors often patch the “strong eye” to see if they can get your brain to learn to use the “lazy” one. Considering that the next step is eye muscle surgery, a patch is “better.” It doesn’t work, but it beats getting stabbed in the eye. So the picture of my 5th birthday is me on a swing, dressed up as a cowboy, wearing an eyepatch. Amy Vore Moorehead is in that picture.
Depth perception is dependent upon stereo-vision. Having two eyes that compare notes on where they think something is lets your brain determine whether something is coming at you, and how fast. Imagine how that works for me. Now imagine little league me. There is no story I can write that will be better than the one you just did, so we’ll move on. When I was younger, I was a surprisingly good Ultimate Frisbee player, and volleyball player. Until dusk. Everyone’s depth perception gets worse in dim light. Mine gets egregious. The number of times I’ve been hit in the face by a dimly lit frisbee or volleyball is unpleasantly high. I look great with a bloody nose thanks for asking.
My left eye (the lazy one) actually has better visual acuity, because it’s done so much less work over the years. However it sees things all scrambled. For most of my life, when I took vision tests, I could read farther down the eye chart with my left eye, but I couldn’t read the letters in order, so I would just tell the doc, “there’s an E, a T, an O in there somewhere.” Brains are amazing at learning to adjust. This was all a fun game/personal party trick until I renewed my driver’s license last fall, and had to take an eye-test. I put my face on the giant eye-test binoculars and the nice lady told me to read the entire 4th line. I read all five letters no problem.
Silence.
She repeated “the entire 4th line.”
I said “O, F, P, Z, D.”
Shorter silence before “all the letters.”
Me: Give me more letters, but that’s all I have. (Getting worried).
She long pauses, like she’s trying to decide if I’m fucking with her for fun, or something.
I take my head out of the binocular-scope, and look at her like I’m not fucking with her for fun. She stands up and twists a knob on the blind-o-meter. Try again.
I look back inside, and suddenly there’s an entire grid of letters on the left side, top to bottom, on what had been a blank white space. I read them, no problem, and look at her. She flips a dial, and the letters I originally read appear on the right side. I read those, again, no problemo. She turns the dial again, and it’s back to blank on the left, letters on the right. “Nope, they’re gone again,” I said. My brain, given the choice, had decided to completely disregard the information coming from left eye, on a driver’s license test! She told me I’d passed, and called the next person. I was freaked out about how many people I was going to Mr. Magoo on the way home.