This week I had an appointment with my optometrist and have proof that we are performing miracles.
I’ve previously mentioned a little challenge I have with the vision in my left eye.
I have a damaged macular which means there’s a noticeable hole in the centre of my vision when using just my left eye.
This picture gives you an idea of what I would see with my left eye.
Thankfully, my right eye works OK and so I can function quite well.
Now, my belief is, we see with our brain, not our eyes.
And so, I have been experimenting with myself over the last few years looking for ways to get my brain to work with the lower quality images it was getting from my eye and developing a compensatory mechanism.
As far as I could tell it wasn’t working.
Being a member of a health fund has certain benefits.
Since we were getting to the end of the year and the refund I would get on glasses would roll-over very soon, I figured it was time for new glasses.
A conversation with the rabbi led to a casual comment that he was taking his son to a behavioural optometrist ie someone who would use exercises to correct vision problems.
When I went to this optometrist, just over a month ago, he did the usual scans and informed me that part the tissue in my eye was dead and he showed me the scan images to prove it.
As a consequence, he didn’t do further testing.
When I voiced my opinion and discussed my experiments he kept insisting that since a significant part my eye was effectively dead it was a problem with the eye itself and not with my brain.
However, to placate me, he ran some further tests and got very excited.
While my eye was obviously damaged there was clearly an issue with how my brain was working (that probably has other consequences and implications which we won’t go into now).
It appears my brain had decided the images from my left eye were of such a poor quality that it filtered out any signals from that eye.
And then the miracle..
When originally tested, I was unable to see a letter on the eye chart at 6/120, which is the maximum setting available.
(6/120 means that I needed to be closer than 6 metres to see the same thing as a person with normal vision would see at 120 metres. At 6/60 we move into the realm of legal blindness. 6/6 is what we called 20/20 vision in the old measure.)
In order to get my brain working (no comments thank you) I was given a set of exercises to do.
These involved a very simple device; a string with three beads attached and a plastic prism.
My mission was to practice looking through the prism and being able to see the two images of the string cross at the various beads.
You can try this yourself – attach a piece of string to a fixed place, I use a door handle, and hold the free end to your chin.
Then, looking at the string you should see two images, one from either eye.
The objective of the exercise is to move the point at which these images cross each other to further points along the string.
After doing that for four weeks I had another session with the optometrist.
At that appointment he tested my vision again and (drumroll…) I am now recognising letters at 6/60 and have developed three dimensional vision.
While this still qualifies as legal blindness it’s a HUGE improvement on what I was able to do before – remember I was out PAST 6/120 so I wasn’t even on the scale.
I don’t do excitement but my optometrist does and he is now talking about being in the realm of miracles.
I’m cool with that.