Click here to read about last week’s appointment.
How Did the Last Week Go?
The last week consisted of so much virtual reality with Vivid Vision. It is an incredible program. Because it is all preset, I can’t choose to play just one or two specific games each day. The most important activities happened to be last, which meant I had to go through the whole set of 8-9 activities, each for 5 minutes to get to them. I did it everyday though!
They are all so good, but man is it time consuming! I had a really hard time making time for my other real world therapy activities. I asked for the OD in Maryland overseeing my Vivid Vision to change the most important activities to be first so that if I only have 20 minutes, I can get the most important work in. I’m also going to do my regular exercises first to make sure that they happen, hopefully it makes a difference.
I have started feeling some changes this week. I went to a movie at the theater and had an experience of feeling like the walls were moving.
At church, while watching the speaker, members of the audience were starting to pop up in my peripheral.
I have gotten sudden flashes of vision that make me jump back, like everything is closer to me.
They are just momentary flashes and feelings, nothing that I could describe visually, but because I’ve been through this before, I know exactly what it is. My brain is playing with the idea of using both eyes. It is the first step. I am so happy to be there!
For the first time, my progress pictures are making me excited. I’ve had plenty where my eyes look straight, but in these ones I wasn’t just haphazardly looking forward. I was actually focusing on a distinct point. One in the distance and the other on my phone. Since surgery, whenever I focus on something my right eye turns way in, but it stayed put for the most part today. Hooray.
Near Focus 
Distance Focus
How Did the Appointment Go?
Eye Control with the Metronome
This is a very simple exercise, but for me, it is pretty challenging. Imagine that there is a grid in front of me like in the picture. Dr. Dan moves a pen from point to point to the beat of a metronome (40bpm) and I just try to watch it.
Sounds simple enough, right? My left eye actually does pretty well, but I can feel my right eye dragging 1-2 seconds behind. I always find it so fascinating when I discover that my eyes aren’t as good in real life as they are in my mind. I come in thinking that I am doing amazing and then I am faced with a different reality.
It’s all good, it’s something that is so simple that I can easily improve. ANYONE can get better eye control with a little work…stereopsis is more complicated.
Heart Chart…Attempt
Speaking of complicated, Dr. Dan had me try the Heart (Hart?) Chart today. I wasn’t seeing double so he wasn’t sure if I was suppressing so he tried putting a red/green filter over the top and we discovered that I was most definitely suppressing.
I tried for a minute or two and was pretty unsuccessful so Dr. Dan had me quickly move on to the next activity before I started having a panic attack about loosing all my VT skills. Just Kidding…sort of.
VTS4
We worked on this for about 20 minutes today. I definitely felt some improvements from last week. I was able to see the ring go behind and got flashes of it getting bigger. It wasn’t automatic, but seeing it at all was really exciting!
When it was coming forwards I was actually feeling some depth with the ring itself, it had a shape.
Paint the Room
This involves looking at one place in the room and then using your thumb to “paint” other parts of the room with peripheral vision.
I was seeing a lot of double which lead to a fun chat about my double vision and just allowing it to be there while I try to open my peripheral and see what happens. I explained that many times I see the double and automatically move my eyes to make things single. This means that I am seeing sequentially instead of seeing big.
By allowing my eyes to be still and see double I’m giving my brain the opportunity to see big and eventually see single. I don’t know if he really understood what I meant, but it makes sense to me and I am going to give it a try this week!
Homework
- Eye Control- Set a metronome to 40 bpm and watch a pencil, one eye at a time, while moving it around the 9 parts of a grid to the beat.
- Head Turns- Focus on a distant object and turn head form left to right while keeping focus ahead, make sure to be using the right eye on the right side and the left eye on the left side.
- Paint the Room- Practice not seeing sequentially and use thumb to paint different parts of the room to keep vision open and slowly learn to see more of the room at one time.
- Vivid Vision- Spend at least 30 minutes everyday on Vivid Vision. Focus on seeing the x,y and z-axis.