I went into vision therapy completely blind, but after 4 appointments and three hours of tests and consultations, I had a much better idea of what I was dealing with, read about that here. There were moments I felt discouraged because I now fully realized the scope of my visual problems. I hadn’t understood before that my strabismus was much more than just an eye turn.
There were many more moments of hope though. Now that I knew the problem, I could fix it. The only stumbling block was the cost. I don’t care who you are, $5000 is a pretty chunk of change. I am a stay at home mom with four kids. My husband has a great job and we live very comfortably, but $5000 doesn’t just magically appear in the budget…at least not in ours.
My Optometrist and I decided that I could do the first few months of therapy mostly at home with visits every 4-6 weeks. I knew that the progress would be slower on my own, but I also knew that I could save myself several visits amounting to hundreds of dollars by doing it this way. It also gave us a chance to rework the budget to make room for the cost and hope and pray for a big tax return.
So what did I do at home??? He gave me three different exercises and I tried to do them every day. I also continued a few things that I had already been doing that he semi-approved of.
Note: I am not a medical professional and do not recommend that you try any of these exercises without consulting an Optometrist for vision therapy first.
Exercise 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.
I kind of think of it like what reading would look like if you watched in fast forward. The eyes move slowly to the right and then jump really fast back to the left for the next line. But instead of stationary words, it’s moving fenceposts or telephone poles or black and white stripes…
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 one I have is called OKN Stripes and cost $3. 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.
I was told to keep the speed at 1 or 2 and the width at ½-1 in and spend a few minutes on each eye going each direction while patching the other eye.
This one was so hard for me, and still is! For the first few progress visits not much changed. I finally did more research and watched videos of other people doing it. Once I saw what the eyes were supposed to be doing it sort of clicked. My optometrist also told me to stop focusing so hard on trying to watch each stripe and to relax and “look soft.”
Exercise 2: Eye Stretches
There are a million and one different ways to do “eye stretches” but my first ones ever involved a few simple steps:
- Patch one eye
- Move a pencil Left, right, up, down, and diagonally in front of you and watch the pencil.
- Repeat with the other eye
These exercises seemed super lame and much too simple to actually do anything so I didn’t really put much time into them until my second progress visit. Dr. Nielsen helped me see that my eyes couldn’t follow the pencil smoothly, they would jump and skip sections. In order for my eyes to be able to see well together, I needed to have them working well on their own. So I repented and started watching the pencil. It is a boring but necessary step.
At least I don’t have to do it alone though. My little baby Everly run for the pencil drawer every time she sees me get out my patch and pencil. She sits right next to me and stares at her pens and pencils too. Then she chews them, colors on the furniture and then
Exercise 3: Red Lens Patch
I have written a
What Exercises can I do with a Red Lens Patch?
Here is the short version: The red lens patch is a patch that is made out of a see-through, red lens. The eye that is covered sees everything except certain objects that cancel? So if I write with a red pen on white paper, my patched eye can see the paper and anything that isn’t red like the table, chairs or anything in the room, but it can’t see the red writing on the page. Only my weak, unpatched eye can see that part. It forces both eyes to be working and is kind of magical.
I was told to start doing 30 minutes of red lens patch therapy every day to start waking up my non-dominant eye. At
My Exercise 1: Patching
Patching is definitely not recommended by Vision Therapy Professionals unless it’s combined with specific exercises. While I understand their point of view, I don’t fully agree and feel that it totally has a place in vision, especially where amblyopia is concerned.
Read this article I wrote about why I believe in patching…to a certain extent.
Up until this point I had been patching for 4-5 hours every day. It helped me gain control of my weak eye and I saw huge improvements in my weak eye’s strength. It did absolutely nothing to help the eye turn, in case you were curious. Nothing has thus far.
I dropped the patching down to about 1 hour each day, sometimes a little more. My goal was to read for 1 hour while patching every day. I started using the red lens patch more and the regular patch less and less.
My Exercise 2: Eye Contact
I had a really neat experience one day at the temple I go to
Sooooo much easier said than done! When I first started trying, after about 10 seconds my head started to throb and I would get dizzy and I wasn’t at all able to focus on what people were saying. I didn’t realize I wasn’t really making eye contact before. I felt like I was just staring everyone down.
I have worked on this for months and it has gotten so much better!
This period of time lasted from December to the end of April. At each progress