In my adult life, I noticed that my right eye was becoming weaker. I could feel it, especially when I was tired. I noticed it in pictures sometimes, but I rarely am in pictures so I didn’t actually see or think about the eye turn very often.
The eye turn was constant, but not as severe so sometimes it wasn’t as noticeable. These two pictures are from around that time. As I’ve gone back through photos, there are plenty where my eyes almost look straight, but there are just as many when my eye turn looks pretty severe.
2014 
2012
The real problem that I was concerned with was my overall vision. There were so many times when we would be driving somewhere, especially at night and I would scream out because I thought we were going to crash. Zac, my husband, would look at me questioningly because we were in no danger, the car or object I feared was always not as close as it had appeared. After blinking and readjusting my eyes, I was able to see that all was well.
I remember taking a babysitter home one night and I swerved around the approaching car, thinking that it was closer to me than it was. My car went off the road a bit, we live in the country so it went onto the gravel next to the road, it was so scary! Ever since that night, I don’t drive in the dark unless I absolutely have to.
There have been several times that I’ve volunteered to drive for a girls night or carpool and the activity started in the day and ended when it was dark and I’ve had someone else drive me and my car home. It just isn’t worth the risk.
But I am an adult! I live in Idaho, there are several months of the year where 5-6 waking hours are dark so this really presents a problem for me.
I decided that 2013 was going to be the year to fix my vision and I scheduled an appointment with the Optometrist at Sam’s Club. I went in ready to get glasses (the vision in my right eye is blurry) and had high expectations, thinking that my problem would be simply fixed by glasses.
He checked my vision and I had perfect 20/20 vision in both eyes. I tried arguing with him. “I know that I have 20/20 vision, but I can’t see out of that eye! Somehow, my brain just knows what the letters are, but I can’t actually see them.” He responded that if I could tell him what the letters were, then I had great vision. He didn’t mention strabismus, he didn’t mention an eye turn, he didn’t suggest anything. His response to it all was along the lines of, “you are so lucky to have such good vision, there is nothing you can do to make it any better, this is as good as it gets.”
I was definitely disappointed and there may have been a few tears shed that evening. I was disappointed that my vision was as good as it gets. Disappointed that my driving situation couldn’t improve and would likely steadily decline throughout my life.
There was a helpless and hopeless feeling, but as I generally do in life, I just got over it. I accepted what he had told me as truth and didn’t question him. I stopped driving at night for the most part and didn’t worry about things too much, and life was great and moved on.
“Knowing” that nothing could be done helped me not dwell on my vision. I did adopt his idea that I was so lucky to have such great vision considering my starting point. So many people had it worse than me. I felt like I had been dramatic complaining about my vision and stopped focusing on what I was missing.
I decided to be grateful for what I had and focused on all the amazingly great things about my life for a while.
Four years later I reached a new level of being determined and decided that I was going to figure out my vision problems and search for the right doctor until I found one that would help me. Read about it here.