I started documenting the early parts of my journey on my personal, family blog. Here is the post that I wrote about my first experiences with patching.
Enjoy~
“It is always easy for me to tell when my eye is wandering because when I talk to people, they look behind themselves to see what I’m looking at. I try to not care, but if I’m being honest, it’s pretty embarrassing. I try to force my eye to look at them, but I can’t. I usually just end up not looking at them at all so that they don’t get confused.
If it was just cosmetic, maybe I wouldn’t care, but it has started affecting my vision. I don’t feel safe driving at night because my depth perception is very poor. I just feel like overall, I’m not seeing as well.
A few years ago I went to an eye doctor, hoping for answers, and he basically told me that there was nothing that could be done, so I accepted that and just kind of stopped worrying about it and had other people drive me when it was dark.
Then a few months ago I decided that I would try seeing an ophthalmologist and get another opinion. I found out that it would be $300 just for the visit so I settled on seeing a new optometrist. I had my appointment in August and Dr. Kohler was so great. He told me that an ophthalmologist would likely want to do surgery to correct the problem, but that I should try patching first. He suggested that I patch my good eye for 4-5 hours every day to strengthen my bad eye.
I left the office and ordered some patches and was very motivated to avoid surgery and get better. He gave me the hope that my eyes could get better and I was excited…that was until I patched for the first time, and the second, and the third. It is awful!
I soon figured out that I can barely see out of my right eye. While wearing the patch everything is really blurry and dull in color. I can read, but it takes me about 5 times as long to decipher and decode (literally). I would try to harvest the garden, but I couldn’t see the colors well enough to know what was ripe.
I run into people, walls, babies, you name it because my eye just isn’t taking everything in. There are definitely moments when I rip off the patch and throw little adult tantrums (usually in the form of eating chocolate) because I’m so frustrated. Like when I’m prepping food and cut myself or when I’m trying to pull Eloise’s hair into a ponytail and miss a huge chunk of hair or when I send texts that nobody can understand because of the combination of me misspelling and Siri autocorrecting or when I step on a child or when I don’t notice Everly destroying something.
After about 6 weeks of patching, I hadn’t really seen any results. Everything was still blurry and dull and I was getting tired of patching for nothing. I called the doctor and asked “are you sure you can’t give me glasses so that everything won’t be blurry???” He was kind and said, just keep doing what you’re doing, glasses won’t help.
I got some wild patches, that totally helped, at least people stopped gasping every time they came to the door and I was patching. My girls think they are so beautiful and if I’m being honest, they are way more fun to wear.”
Read here about the changes and miracles I saw as I continued patching.