MAGIC EYE or I Didn’t Know What it was Like to be Amblyopic, Because I Grew Up that Way.

           My mother always said she felt bad because she didn’t know about Amblyopia. Had she known, I am sure the medical-knowledge she had would’ve reared it’s highly useful and powerful head to aid in her doing everything she could to make it go away. That’s just how it was with her, you gave her the place to start, and she would just make it better. Animals, illness, cuts needing stitches; it was all made better and sent on its merry way, never to be mentioned again. But she didn’t know about anything like a Lazy Eye, and because it wasn’t obvious, she didn’t catch it. Even though things like that should have been taken care of by doctors, schools, or professionals, people are always falling through the cracks, and so did I. I never blamed her in the least. I never blamed anyone. I didn’t even know the implications of what it is to be Amblyopic. Now, as an adult, I look back and so many things start to make sense, once I really started thinking about it.

           The first time I came into the lexicon of the Lazy Eye was when they finally caught it when I was around nine. My mother says they did a test where I was shown a 3-D image of a bee or a fly and I was supposed to try to hold the wing. I thought I was all in, grabbing the wing like they wanted me to. Didn’t really get what the deal was… My mother told me even without the special glasses she could see it in 3-D. Apparently I was way off.  She was horrified.  They kept telling me I wasn’t doing it, and to try again.  No luck.  I joined the 3% of people with this impairment.  The treatment instructions were to wear a pink plastic eye patch we bought at the drug store for an hour every night while watching TV. I also had a brand new pair of pink plastic glasses to wear for reading the blackboard and watching television, as it also turned out I was myopic.  

     I hated the glasses. I hated the eye patch. I cried when I had to wear it. I begged off wearing it. What, really, would an hour a night really do, anyway? After a while, after the fighting, the patch was gone. The glasses hid in their case unless absolutely needed. I couldn’t walk in them, they made me dizzy and only having peripheral vision in my “bad” eye, with glasses, I wasn’t able to get that.  I squinted, I copied other students’ notes, I did everything but put those hideous glasses on my face. I memorized all my violin and orchestra music because the stand was too far for me to see the splatter of the notes on the page. The conductor or teacher was always pulling me back from the shared stand, but my stand partners always accommodated me which I thank them for. I would wave at anyone who drove by along my rural country roads when I was walking, because I couldn’t actually recognise someone in a vehicle as they passed by. I was too near-sighted.

           Now, as an adult, I still understand that being as near-sighted as I am is not so uncommon and was easily remedied by the forceful prescription of my eye-doctor and his rather dictatorial torture session behind the exam room with the nurse and a pair of contact lenses. Once I was used to the lenses, and fingers in the eye (I was pretty terrified of all things eye-related until this point), I felt pretty invincible. I could see leaves, leaves! on trees. Not those big green shady bundles of wavy bits, but real trees with separate identities. And, wow, I could actually see blades of grass, individual blades of grass, and rocks!! What an amazing thing, to see!  The contacts made a difference because I had the full peripheral vision I needed to make up for the lack of depth and central vision in my right eye.

           The odd part about the near-sightedness is, I have one eye that is really myopic, but that eye is the “good” eye. The eye that has better technical correctable vision is the “bad” eye. The only reason we have for this is that my right eye turns in ever-so-much, not enough for people to notice all the time, unless I’m tired or have been doing close work, but enough to give me double vision. I have a wonky focal point. Which means if I look at something straight on, if I close my right (“bad”) eye, my left eye continues to look in the same direction, but if I close my left (“good”) eye, my right eye tracks across until it is looking straight on. It was looking to the left of the object I was looking at. I don’t know why my brain picked the eye with the worse corrective prescription, maybe it had to do with the muscles in that eye being stronger, but it went with the left eye as its main lookout.  It is wholly possible that it went with the more nearsighted eye because of my love of reading and writing and drawing, even at such a young age. 

My brain had to make a choice. I couldn’t walk around my whole life seeing double. So my brain, that insightful, sly, little creature of adaptability, shut down messages from my right eye. It refused to read them. And I couldn’t understand what had happened. I used to try to take notes dictated from my high school teacher by resting my face on my hand, covering my “good” eye, and try to write with my vision from my “bad” eye. It was like parts of the page where I was putting the words, and the blue lines, too, all just kind of went somewhere. There was nothing. And not a dark spot or a hole or blackness or a blurry bit. Just something that I could not even acknowledge as existing. Just. Not. The objects just… disappear. My notes would be all over the place, some words on top of other words. It made no sense to me then. It was just kind of fun to do in a boring class.

           I could still see out of that eye, but I didn’t know what it was or where I was seeing. It was kind of like a back-up. The two eyes gave me a different shade on the world depending on which was open. The right eye makes everything whiter, more blue, almost. My left eye, the dominant eye, gives a more yellow tone to a white. So the world is more golden from that eye. Another game was to see how drastically the colours of the landscape and sky changed from one eye to the other. If I close my good eye, all vision reluctantly shifts to the right eye, although it is more of a peripheral view, where things flit in and out of what I see: colours, shapes, and if I move my eye a bit, sometimes better detail. But I cannot read words or letters, they are there but I can’t recognize them. My brain has, effectively, shut my eye off. My eye is healthy and normal. It is my brain and optic nerve making the ultimate decision to ignore all messages, and so the neural pathways developed as such.  Optic nerve atrophy.  Vision atrophy.  The Canadian National Institute for the Blind lists Amblyopia as a visual impairment and disability. Okay. If you say so. I suppose it is, and I know if I ever had anything happen to my good eye, I would be hosed. I would be clinically legally blind if left to my right eye’s vision.  This is made more real by the fact that people with high-myopia and amblyopia have a much higher percentage of cases of retinal detachments, and I have both.

           In more recent days, one of my jobs was as a seamstress. I had really begun to notice what it is to be amblyopic. I read somewhere that in regular life, most jobs are not affected by a lazy eye, unless you are a sharpshooter for the government or someone who threads needles all day. Of course, I had to choose one of those two. Threading a needle can be ridiculous. I can see the thread perfectly fine. I see the little hole in the needle perfectly fine. But putting one into the other is a task and a half. Reaching out to snip threads that are perfectly open and stretched out so plainly in front of me from the spool to the machine can get embarrassing; sometimes I snip air two or three times, even if I am holding the thread in one hand and the scissors in the other. Two hands working in unison are extremely important for tactile perspective in the world of amblyopics.  

           So, really, what does all this mean? What it means is, I don’t see in 3-D. My brain ignoring my right eye makes me “stereoblind.” So everything comes to me flat. I think I can imagine what 3-D is, but I really don’t know. I see in perspectives and shadowing and size. I know how far away everything because of relativity. But things trip me up, and these things are because I am stereoblind. I just thought I was inept, wimpy, and terribly not athletic. I had no idea what I was actually missing. And no-one else knew, either. I was never told what having a lazy eye meant for me. I had no idea that I could never catch any of those things people toss casually at people, keys, ball, chocolate bar, pen, book because I couldn’t tell it’s relativity to my hands, not because I had no skills with my hands. I hated when people tossed stuff for me to catch. I would plead them not to throw anything for me to catch. I was always absolutely amazed if by sheer chance I actually caught the item in question. It almost gave me panic attacks when someone made the motion to toss something to me.  Don’t even suggest I succeed at basketball, putting that ball in a basket somewhere up there. How far away from it am I? I have no idea. Aim with hope. Volleyball? It’s coming down at me. I go to hit it, but it’s not to me yet, and I pre-return shot it. And the ball hits my shoulder. Baseball. The ball gets bigger as it comes toward me. Make magic contact with ball when I guess it is the right size. Catch it in the outfield? It’s those keys being tossed to me again—epic fail. Tennis? Swing the racket, and then the ball goes by. It seems kind of cruel, now that I think about it. They actually didn’t let me take part in the archery section of phys. ed.  I really thought I was just the worst at sports you could be, but it was all about how I saw, or didn’t see. I cannot tell you how far away something is. I have a poor concept of metres, feet, how far that house is from the road. Twenty feet and eighty feet are both conceptual ideas. I cannot tell you which distance is the accurate one.  How big is this room?  Well, it’s about seven steps across.  I know this only because I walked it.

           Something else that unnerved me that didn’t affect anyone else was travelling on uneven terrain. Again, I thought I was a big weenie. Running and jumping over a fence, I imagined my legs getting tangled in the fence when I misjudged its height, and falling on my face. So I climbed over things. Or more easily, under them. Climbing along rocky shores, where all the others were jumping or stepping freely from rock to rock to rock, I would be far behind, crouched low, reaching out with my foot until I found my placement in my environment, and then I would transfer to that leg. Like an overcautious wimp, I took any hand offered to me to help me along. Sometimes people noticed I had trouble, but none of us really knew why.  I always use a handrail or touch the wall on stairs.  I hate escalators, because I never know where they are under my feet.  I have to stand with one foot up and one down so I know when they flatten out.  I hate touch-screens because my idea of where my finger is and the screen’s idea of where it wants my finger are two different places.

           Without depth-perception, I have trouble walking in hard snow that has footsteps and ruts in it.  I feel like I am drunk, putting my feet in all the wrong places and having my body redirecting my intentions in unintentional ways. I thought it was just THAT kind of snow my whole life and wondered why I seemed to have issues, why I was so far behind everyone else, why I seemed to be the only one moving like an intoxicated horse.  Now, I can fall down with pride and understanding that it’s visual impairment and not just ineptitude.

           I often walk in the woods. And I often am whacked in the face by branches and twigs. I don’t see them. Three dimensions would provide me with the sight of a branch looming in front of my nose. Without it, that twig melts into the rest of the twigs, until it hits my face. Sometimes I just pull my hat down over my eyes and plow through with my eyes cast straight down at the terrain. Roots also get me. I don’t see them jumping up to take my toes. I just see them. I have learned to be cautious and step over all roots with care. At night, shadows get even sneakier. In the day, they can suggest a dip in the road or a curb. At night, they suggest holes of substantial width and possible depth. It is a shadowed world of possibilities. One hopes for the best and stays vigilant. Step high. Reach out with a toe sometimes. I have a beautiful walking stick which I named “my Pokey Stick” which gives lots of assistance with my orientation. At night, a garbage bag in front of a flower pot could be a dog sitting there. Maybe that sign, plus the mailbox several meters behind it, and a red reflector can meld together into a person holding a red flashlight. I just talk myself out of what my eyes see and rely on what my brain knows. The flattening out of a 3-D scene in front of you can sometimes really make you bewildered. Sometimes it’s a puzzle to make the visual connection to what it really is you see.

           I cannot tell you how many times I have whacked a shoulder on a door frame. Without any depth-perception, it is almost natural for me to misjudge where my orientation is. I usually make that error in judgment at least once a day. Whack. Oops. Commonplace. I knock my head on work lamps, getting too close and not seeing how close. I’ve hit my forehead on the panes of glass on a regular basis when misjudging my distance in my quest for a view. Even mirrors have forehead prints. Being near-sighted, I can get pretty close without my contact lenses in, and getting close often means contact made.

           If I am outside in any kind of light, my amblyopic eye automatically closes.  It hides away, screaming; “Bright light! Bright light!”  I walk around outside with one eye closed, like Pop-eye. Okay, how about, say, if I get up at 5am and turn on the not-as-bright bathroom light, it seems to get lighter and darker and lighter and darker until my eyes and brain wake up and adjust.  If I turn on the really-bright bathroom light, I’m Pop-eye again.

           I read an article that described regular 3-D vision as having three co-ordinates to give you exact knowledge of where you are in the room.  When you are missing one of the co-ordinates, you no longer have your placement.  It reminds me of how a lost plane could not be found because one of the satellites of the three required was not working to provide co-ordinates on the plane’s last whereabouts.  That’s me, the missing plane, a satellite down.  Get out the sextant.

           Here’s a good one: Person A and I went out to eatery for lunch. When we were at the little counter where you get the napkins and condiments and so forth, I wanted one of those little paper cups for ketchup. I had the tray in one hand, so Person A told me to stick my cup under the ketchup pump spout and she would pump me some ketchup. So I held my little cup under the spout. She didn’t pump. I waited. She seemed also to be waiting for something. Finally she grabbed my hand and moved it to where it was supposed to be. She was kind of confused AND amused. I had been SURE I was perfectly aligned but she assured me I was way off. So you can even be tricked by ketchup. It’s moments like that that I think, wow, how do I even function with others? But, then I laugh and tell everyone the story about how I can’t even find the ketchup spout. Because it’s a pretty good story, and it kind of gives people a clue as to what I mean about depth perception.

           I know working close-up with sewing and writing and drawing details plays havoc with my focus, and trying to keep both eyes locked on the same object makes eye strain happen quicker. It is easier just having the sight in the weak eye blocked out sometimes, rather than trying to get them to focus together. Which is why I returned to the resisted patch of youth, only this time one my unseeing eye.  Now I have two, lovely, soft, patches that were handmade for me, and when I am having a “bad eyes day”, I shut one down and let the other do its thing.

           It took me five years to be comfortable enough to get a license, but I prefer NOT to drive if I can get out of it. I walk everywhere I can, and if someone else will drive me, I am happier. I have had my license for over 20 years, now. I took the test and only one part had anything to do with depth perception. That test never changes. It’s always the stop sign that is supposed to stand out. Once you know this, you just tell them and they are happy. One learns distance for cars by perspective. Although, especially if I am out walking and need to cross the road, I will not cross if a car only has one headlight.  Not from a superstition, I assure you, but because with two headlights, I can tell by the distance between them how close they are in the night.  With only one headlight approaching, they could be anywhere.  Although, I have never bumped into another car in misjudging distance. Often I leave extra space. This is more the complaint, about how much room I leave when I park. I trust the ferry man to let me know exactly when he wants me to stop closely to the car in front. That part I need him for. My Dad taught me how to drive using reference points on my car (the yellow line should hit just outside the front corner headlight) so I wouldn’t keep veering into the ditch when I was passing an oncoming car. I had to learn how far away things were by size and in knowing the proportions of my car. Which is a reason why I have owned two cars, both the exact same make, the details of my own car I have down pat. I know how far the hood can sneak over the bumper line of the car in front in a parking lot. By that, I mean, perspective again. Not how close it is in distance, but how much of the car disappears behind the object of my car’s hood. That probably sounds a little frightening, but it is a coping skill I learned as a human with no stereovision. It is what I know. I never miss any other method.  Mind you, no-one would ever let me get a pilot’s license.  Or plow driveways.  Or direct traffic.

           I think, if all of a sudden, I was granted depth-perception, I would probably feel terrified. Things flying at me all the time might be a bit much. I’d probably be sick to my stomach from motion sickness. I imagine the way 3-D movies sometimes force their way into my perception and I don’t like the feeling. When I used to go see a movie in 3-D, I’d just close one eye and tilt my head and endure the slightly nauseous feeling and the headache that ensues. I don’t enjoy the experience. I recently purchased a pair of 2-D conversion glasses which turn a 3-D film back into a regular 2-D movie for the wearer. Best money I’ve spent forever. I can go to films and enjoy them now. They go back to being normal, not cartoonish. My perception of film 3-D is not realism at all. 3-D is for people that are not me. Now I am just mad that all the movies are 3-D now, and I have to shell out an extra $3 for something I can’t have.  They wonder when I wave off their 3-D glasses hand-out.

           It used to frustrate me to no end that everyone could finally get at least one of those Magic Eye® puzzles but to this day, I have never seen the image. I have trouble with some pictures on the TV screen, not knowing exactly what it is I am looking at. I am not sure why, but some images just do not read into my brain. Perhaps those are the ones I catch with the amblyopic eye. Sometimes I see some pretty funny misinterpretations.  I’ve been told my visual acuity is poor because of the amblyopia, and this is why I miss things, especially darker scenes on a smaller screen.  So no Batman on the iPad.  It’s just some blue stuff moving over to that green thing.

           I know I overfill teapots and closed-sided containers all the time. I can’t tell from above if it is full without touching it. I know I knock cups off of counters when I go to reach out, misjudging them with my eyes, or I set a cup on the counter, only to feel it pass out of my hand and fall on the floor. I know I rely on other people making the contact with me when they want to do a high five or pass me something. I reach until the object touches me. Then I know it is there. Contact made. Success. Relief. But I don’t think about my disability so much because I know the reason behind why I do some things the way I must. At least I can see how I do see. It could be way worse. And, as I said at the start, I didn’t really know it was supposed to be as different as apparently it is, but I have had to make my own adjustments to life.

           However, all this has given me something, for certain. I can draw and paint from a photo and make it look, to 3-D sighted viewers, like the artwork itself has three dimensions. The photo with its shadows and perspectives and relative sizes is how I see the world. So I can copy it onto the paper or canvas. To me, it looks like the photo. To 3-D sighted people, it has depth. I’ve read that Rembrandt had strabismus, and stereoblindness, so I feel I’m in good company.  I look at this as a gift to make up for falling over curbs and jarring my spine walking through the surprise drop-grading they use on sidewalks where there is a driveway.  I call those whoopty-bumps, where the sidewalk just–whoops–and then-oof!  Whoops!   I know they are for wheelchairs, strollers, etc., but give us stereoblind SOMETHING, here, so we don’t look ridiculous tripping over nothing but the bare sidewalk.  A nice yellow arrow would be sweet.

           But what I find most frustrating is that we LOOK like we can see fine and normally. No-one has any clue the effort we go through to appear normal. The running into doorframes, things beside us, other people, window glass, tree branches, falling over whoopty-bumps, not getting hand-eye contact with placing or reaching for things, not seeing things because no depth perception makes everything sink together, not recognizing faces or knowing if people are walking toward you or away at a distance (this brings anxiety, and until they are visibly bigger or smaller, I don’t know if I will pass them or if we are heading in the same direction), having to use your hands for orientation and placement, mobility on rough or rocky terrain… It’s all invisible to everyone we come in contact with; they have no clue. And they probably don’t really care. There’s no help for us, organizations like the CNIB talk about preventing it in children, but after that, there’s no support or help or discussion on the limitations set upon us. We are invisible. Or we’re making it up. Because it’s not seen, we are left out of all discussion. It sucks. There are times when I am left feeling frustrated, and this is why I stopped pretending I had regular old every day vision, and came out of the 2-dimensional closet.  Now I can say, Depth perception would be a nice thing to try out.  I’d go jump off things and know how far I was jumping for joy.