Vision Therapy Appointment #1- The Beginning

Today I started my official vision therapy and it was great. For the last four months, I have been going in every 4-6 weeks for progress checks.
The optometrist would give me homework to work on my primitive reflexes and eye tracking to help build a solid foundation.

If I had an unlimited supply of money I would have started right away with official visits, but I wanted to do as much on my own before starting to save money.

I finished all the primitive reflexes and improved my eye tracking enormously in the last four months so we decided to start doing actual visits instead of just doing progress checks. today was the first one.

To say that I was excited is an understatement! There was definitely some nervous anticipation mixed in there too. I had the butterflies for a few days leading up to the appointment. Who knows why though, I knew exactly what to expect. I guess that’s just what happens when you put yourself out there.

Today we sat in his office and discussed my goals. I want stereopsis and all the amazing stuff that comes with it. Better eye tracking, improved night vision, straight eyes, more eye endurance, and fewer headaches. He was careful to tell me that stereopsis may not be possible for me because of the severity of the eye turn and my past surgeries and the scar tissue from them. Even without stereopsis there are huge improvements that can be made.

I understand that it might not be possible, but I’m still definitely aiming for stereopsis, reach for the stars, right?

For the therapy we did five different exercises

OKN Stripes
Eye Stretches
Vectogram
Paint the Room
Red/Green Glasses

I’ll go into more detail about each one so you can see what we are working on!

1. OKN Stripes

OKN is short for Optokinetic nystagmus and is a reflex that allows you to follow a moving target without moving your head. Imagine driving down the road and watching the telephone poles go by. You don’t move your head to follow each one, your eyes automatically jump forward to the next one as the first one gets close, then passes.

There is an app that can be downloaded for free called Smart Optometry that has OKN stripes, but there are a ton of others as well. The app is simply black and white stripes moving across the screen. You can change the width, speed, direction, and color and the exercise is to stare at the screen so that your eyes can practice the reflex.

My optometrist held the screen in front of me and watched me watch the screen. He adjusted the speed direction and width and encouraged me to “look soft” and relax my eyes, allowing them to do their thing.

After doing it for the last few months I am getting so much better. My left eye has got it down and I can feel my eye making tiny little jumps. The right eye still needs more work, but it is getting so close.

Homework: Spend 1 minute going both directions with my left eye and two minutes with my right ( while covering the other one), keeping the bar width around 1/2 – 1 in and the speed at 4.

Eye Stretches

“Eye stretches” is such vague term and refers to so many different exercises. In the past, “eye stretches” has been me patching one eye while following a pencil up, down, left, right, and diagonally. But today it was a little different.

Today the exercise was to patch one eye and hold a pencil off to one side. I would close my unpatched eye and try to visualize and sense where the pencil was. The goal was to focus on the eye muscles and the way it feels to look to the side, then open my eyes and try to have my eye pointed exactly at the pencil. Sounds easy, right?

I struggled greatly so he had to make it easier, these are the steps he gave me:

Hold pencil off to the side
Close the unpatched eye
Visualize the pencil and sense my muscles moving the eye
Reach across with my other hand and pinch the pencil
Open eye and be pointing directly at the pencil

I need to get more in touch with my eye muscles and learn to feel them work so that I can eventually learn to control them.

Another exercise he had me do was to close my eyes and gently touch my eyelids, then look from the left to the right feeling my eyeballs moving (it feels soooo weird!) and also paying attention to the way the muscles feel.

Homework: Practice the pencil grabs and pencil hide and seek (I made up the name) while patched going to the right and left for both eyes while patched.

Vectograph

This one was completely new to me. I had seen it at my son’s vision therapy appointments but never tried it myself. The optometrist put two cards, each with a picture of a rope in a circle, into a vectograph viewer and handed me polarized glasses to wear. At first, the two cards were lined up perfectly, but he slowly slid them apart and back together to see if anything changed while I fixed my gaze on the cards.

I know from watching my son do it that the rope should appear to get closer and further away from me. I didn’t experience any sensation of it coming out of the page, but it was my first try so I’m not too disappointed.

I could feel my eyes going in and out of focus and he started noticing it too because when they switched focus they were becoming more and less straight. So I wasn’t seeing 3D, but something was happening in my brain.

I am ready to buy the whole set up so that I can try it at home and get some daily practice in!

There wasn’t any homework for this portion, it is just for in office therapy time.

Paint the Room

Paint the room is an activity focused on improving peripheral vision. I sat in a chair and was told to focus on a sticky note directly in front of me on the wall. While focusing on the sticky note, I was supposed to use my thumb to paint different objects that I could see in my peripheral vision.

My wandering eye kept trying to cheat and the exercise was super challenging for me so we made a few adjustments. I would fixate (look) with my left eye while I “painted” the left half of the room with my thumb and fixate with my right eye while painting the right side of the room with my thumb.

The key to successfully getting my central vision working with both eyes together is to get my peripheral vision working well first. I’m going to really put a ton of work into peripheral work for the next two weeks!

Homework: Practice the paint the room activity at home.

Red/Green Glasses

I have been doing a ton of anti-suppression work at home so we didn’t spend much time on it in the office. I’ve been using the amblyoplay app so he just went through and picked the specific ones he wants me doing and gave some ideas on how to get my peripheral vision more involved.

Homework: Do 30 minutes of anti-suppression work each day, with a focus on strengthening my peripheral vision.

Overall Thoughts

I thought I was going to go in and be ready to fuse images and see in 3D, but I was definitely wrong. I still have lots of work in strengthening my eyes. I have been working so hard, but I guess I’m making up for 32 years of nothing.

I have been doing the exercises for just one day and my eyes feel so tired. I feel like I’m blinking constantly trying to bring everything back into focus. I love it! It means that the exercises are doing something and if I keep it up, I will progress! I am hoping that it doesn’t stay like this forever though.

I’m going to try to include progress pictures with each visit and hopefully we will start to see some changes with my eye turn! I know that there have already been changes with how well I see and looks aren’t everything, but I would sure love to see that eye turn go away!

Click here for my next Appointment