After 9 1/2 years of glasses, patching, and surgeries, we made the trek to Salt Lake City for what we didn’t realize would be our final appointment for a long time. At the appointment, my visual acuity was great 20/30 for my right eye and 20/20 for my left. My prescription had improved to +0.75 and +1.25. There was no measurable esotropia or exotropia (inward or outward eye turn). I still had a small vertical misalignment (DVD).
They tested my stereovision and I scored a big fat 0. I don’t see it tested anywhere else in my records except for when I was 3 and didn’t understand. I’m sure that they did at each appointment, but they didn’t write down the results each time. Their goal was to align my eyes, not train my eyes to work together.
In the beginning, the hope was to get
I remember sitting in the chair in the ophthalmologist’s office and the doctor telling me that I didn’t have to wear glasses anymore. I had already finished patching and I was so excited to be done with glasses too!
He celebrated with us the fact that I was victoriously done. He congratulated us on being dedicated to patching and glasses. Our perseverance had gotten us to this point.
I am so so grateful for my doctor, Thomas Williams. Without his expertise, I may have lost sight in my weak eye. Because of him, I am able to use both eyes to some extent with my peripheral vision. My eyes were mostly straight through my school years and I didn’t have to endure teasing. Considering the starting point, what he did was nothing short of miraculous.
Do I wish that he would have known about and encouraged vision therapy to complete the process, yes to a degree, but I am also completely at peace with it all. I feel strongly that everything in my life is happening exactly as it is supposed to. I was supposed to go through this experience as an adult, not as a child.
I went back home and everyone asked me if I’d lost my glasses and I announced that I didn’t have to wear glasses anymore. It was thrilling and I was so excited and relieved to be done.
Around this time, my life at home changed significantly. My parents got divorced. My mom went back to school and she and my sister and I moved to California for her to complete her schooling. I was very lucky to be very involved with both of my parents and went back to visit my dad often.
At one of those visits, we headed to Salt Lake for an appointment with my childhood ophthalmologist. I was 12 years old and was complaining about my right eye being blurry and wandering out at times. My exotropia was at 16 diopters at distance and 8 at near. I still had a vertical shift of 5 diopters.
These results weren’t surprising and are very typical for strabismus patients who don’t learn to see with stereopsis.
I don’t know what happened after the appointment, I don’t know what conversations were or were not had between my parents and the ophthalmologist. I do believe that there were differing opinions about what was to be done. I wasn’t involved in any of that so I haven’t the slightest idea what was going on.
I do know that that was the last appointment with an ophthalmologist I ever went to until I was 32 years old. Part of me wants to wonder about all the what-ifs and dwell on them. What if they had stayed married? What if my parents had kept taking me in? What if they had discovered vision therapy?
But the bigger part of me has complete faith that my life has gone and is going exactly according to plan. Everything happens for a reason. This was a journey I needed to take as an adult, not as a 12-year-old.
I had a few appointments with optometrists over the next 20 years, I even had a run-in with vision therapy as a teenager, read about it here.