Can I See You Now?

I had my first eye surgery at age two. The second was two years later and the third was at age seven. My eye was crossed, just one. I think they call that lazy eye now. They say it's more politically correct. Someone told me that little kids don't think the word "crossed" is positive. I personally don't think the word "lazy" is such a good substitute, but then again they didn't ask me. I also think political correctness has gotten out of hand, but that's a separate blog post. I do remember words they used to explain why I didn't have proper vision in the eye: false fusion. You look that phrase up on the internet and you read words like dichoptic and stimuli and monocular. All I know, and I still cannot fully explain what I see and how I see, is that I am legally blind in that eye.

The first two operations were on my left eye, the one that was slothful. Since by age four I had not read the medical literature for those type of surgeries, I am clueless as to the reasons. The third surgery was on the "good" right eye. I remember everyone, my parents, my doctors, the nurses, their assistants, referring to my right eye as "the good one". I also remember thinking, at the tender age of seven, if this eye was so good, why did it have to have an operation? They told me that there are muscles behind each eye that move the eye and that the one on the right was stronger than the left and was pulling it inward. They were going to cut the muscle, thus weakening it.

Post-surgery, lazy eye was no longer lazy. It was industrious, lively, straight as an arrow, and looked perfect. Problem? Still could not see a whit. Not even the big E. But this is when life for me really got amazing, got really fun and interesting. This is when I learned that the unknown could be exciting. This is when my parents and my doctors put their heads together and decided to send me away, to send me away to rehab. They believed, through therapy, that my left eye could be trained to see and the best place to do this was Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, 550 miles away.

I. Am. Seven. Seven years old. It's 1962 and I am about to fly on a plane for the first time in my life. Traveling to a city where, during the week, I will be living in a hospital environment, training an eye that has never seen like everyone else sees to see, and on the weekends living with a family that I only know through their relatives in my hometown. Can things get anymore fun? Seriously.

My Mother and I arrive in Houston, meet my home away from home family, and go check in the hospital. My rehab begins the next day and, Mother, being a farmers wife, must go back home after a few days. I will see my real family again in three weeks, the end of my rehab stint.

I don't know how vision therapy is practiced today, but in the early sixties it involved three-D movie watching, three-D reading, and torture. Torture to my way of thinking. The therapists would patch my good, right eye, sit with me, and "force" me to watch and read aloud with my bad, left eye. There is no possible way for me to accurately describe to the normal-sighted how horrible, how scary this is. The closest description is like being trapped in a tiny, dark room with only a small pen light showing you there's a monster sitting just to your left. To this day, I detest "Alice in Wonderland" because that was the book of choice of the therapist.

I had to figure someway out of this, someway to please the therapists and doctors to get them to stop this suffering. I knew when any progress was made, praise was heaped upon the patient. I knew that, in order for me to receive that praise, I had to read with my left eye. Or, it had to appear that I was reading with my left eye. So, I started reading with my left eye, or so it seemed. The therapists were thrilled. The doctors were amazed. My vision had improved 100%. After three weeks of therapy, I was going to be able to leave to continue this treatment at home.

What they did not know, what they never suspected, was that seven year old little me had fooled them all. I had loosened ever so slightly the inside corner of my eye patch and was able to read aloud about Alice falling down that damn rabbit hole with my good one, my loyal one, my right eye.

My secret did not get discovered until I had returned home and returned to my second grade classroom. My beloved teacher, Mrs. Bray, also had a "bad" eye, but she was completely blind in it. My Mother was still patching my right eye as prescribed by my Houston doctors and, as a result, I was struggling in class. My angel teacher finally had a meeting with my parents and told them I was going to need a psychiatrist if they continued this "therapy". I was questioned about how I had had the miraculous recovery in Houston, but had seemingly now reversed back to the original condition.

I confessed. And that confession garnered me another three weeks in Houston. Ultimately, according to the doctors, the therapy failed. To me, though, despite the patched right eye reading sessions, it was six weeks of fun and adventure. My eyesight is the same as I have always had and I know no difference. Better to see you with, my dear.