When I decided to start my journey in August 2018 I was planning on going to an ophthalmologist because that is where I always went as a kid. I was originally told that my insurance wouldn’t cover ophthalmology so I went with an optometrist first to save $300.
I think that God sent me a terrible person on the other line with the insurance company on purpose so that I would find vision therapy. If I had started with an ophthalmologist I would have just been told that surgery was the only way and would have never been forced to research and find a better way.
After more digging with the insurance company, I discovered that, of course, ophthalmology was covered. I called and scheduled an appointment with the ophthalmologist office that I had gone to as a child.
I wish I could have taken a video of the moment that I told my Behavioral Optometrist (the vision therapy guy) that I was going in to see an ophthalmologist. “Why? Are you going to have
My reply was simple, “No, I want everyone’s opinion before I decide what I’m going to do. Ophthalmologists spend years studying the eye and have tons of experience with strabismus, I’d be crazy not to ask their opinion.”
I don’t blindly follow anyone. I research and study and pray and then decide my course of action. I want to know the options, research, opinions, and results before I make a choice.
The Appointment
The office I wanted to go to is in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is not where I live, but I happened to be planning on going on a trip there with my family for the March Madness Tournament so I took a little detour while I was down there to the office.
I walked in thinking that everything would look and feel so familiar. It didn’t. It was old and outdated, which made it believable that it was the same place, but nothing seemed familiar.
I was called back and met with Dr. Ryan, who turned out to be an Orthoptist, not an ophthalmologist. Apparently, he was the one who was in charge of patching, prisms and other alternatives to surgery. But that was really just for kids.
He was very confused about why I was there, most adults just head right for surgery because it is pretty common to believe that it isn’t possible to fix strabismus in adults without surgery.
I told him, I wanted stereopsis.
He told me that there’s a 1% chance of people with congenital strabismus gaining stereopsis.
I asked about vision therapy and success stories.
He laughed and said that vision therapy can work, but only if the eye turn is less than 10 diopters…mine was 30-35 diopters.
To even have a chance at stereopsis I would need surgery first to correct the eye turn, then vision therapy to teach my eyes to work together. This option was too risky though because it could end with permanent double vision.
Then he started to annoy me. He started trying to empathize with me about having a lazy eye. “Do you ever notice people looking over their shoulder when you talk to them because they don’t know where you are looking? That must be hard. We can help you and fix it so that you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
I told him that, yes, I would like to fix my eye cosmetically, but I want my eyes to work together. I don’t want to continue having surgeries every 5-10 years for the rest of my life.
We chatted and discussed and I asked a million questions. He was actually very patient and kind and tried to be open. I can’t blame him for being biased towards his own line of work.
He ended up giving me a stick-on prism to put on glasses. The prism bends the light so that the images from each eye match. I made some super expert pictures to help explain what it is that a prism does because it was SO confusing to me at first!
People who have developed normal, binocular vision are able to point both of their eyes towards an object. Both eyes are looking at the same thing and the brain combines the two images to make one complete image.
With strabismus, the eyes don’t point in the same direction. One eye looks ahead, while the other looks to the side and sees a completely different image. This is how I see. It is super confusing for my brain so my brain has learned to suppress or ignore the extra image. The brain can’t combine the images because the eyes aren’t looking at the same object.
Prism glasses are meant to solve this problem. They have an angle that matches the angle of the eye turn. The light coming through the glasses is bent and the image is moved over so that the image that is actually straight in front of you, is moved over to where the lazy eye is actually pointed. So the straight eye sees the star naturally, and the lazy eye sees the star because the prism moves the image.
With both eyes looking at the same thing, putting the two images together should be much more manageable.
So I got the prism, found some sweet glasses at Claire’s and started wearing them. Dr. Ryan told me to use them for a month, if I wasn’t able to fuse images together at that point then surgery would be the answer.
I left the office feeling pretty discouraged. I had two different, very specialized vision professionals telling me completely opposite things. I guess I hoped that the orthoptist would jump on the vision therapy train and tell me to go for it.
After a few weeks of letting it all roll around in my brain, I finally settled on a solution that felt good and made sense to me. I decided that I am going to go all in with vision therapy for this year. I’m going to see how far I can get and on January 1, 2020, I will reevaluate. At that point, if I am able to point my eyes in the same direction, I’ll keep doing vision therapy. If I’m able to fuse with the prisms, but not point my eyes straight, then I will have surgery to straighten my eye and then continue vision therapy.
I feel like vision therapy is the path I’m supposed to be on right now. I know that it is exactly what I should be doing to get me where I’m going. I don’t know if surgery will be a part of the plan or not. We will find out!