Strabismus

You probably don’t know what this is. I didn’t. I learned the hard way and I hope that you don’t. My advice is to stay far away from anything that may have to do with strasbismus.

Here’s my story. This fall I did something I rarely do – I went to Tiger Stadium to watch the Detroit Tigers do battle with the St. Louis Cardinals in the best seats I have ever had for baseball. I was sitting between home plate and first base, nor far above the visitor’s team dugout, a great seat for seeing just about everything on the field. Even the scoreboard was in plain view, not the one in center field, the closer one just opposite my seat, along the mezzanine across the field and above the home team dugout.

Around the third inning I began to have trouble seeing the score. I wasn’t sure why at first, but by game’s end it was clear; I was seeing two images of the scoreboard and one was overlapping the other making both unreadable. I shook off the unpleasant sensation and forgot about it. Over the next couple days, the problem returned several times, now clearly a problem of double vision. We were on a camping trip, 100 miles from home and hours away from the ophthalmologist I had seen for my cataract surgery two years earlier. I called from the campground for an appointment. The best they could do, the lady said, was an appointment in three weeks.

The condition got worse. I was unable to drive home from the campout since I saw two of everything. By the time I arrived home, the double vision thing was a 24-hour per day issue, affecting everything I did that required vision. That is just about everything. I was unable to read, watch TV, or concentrate on anything that required sharp vision. I was desperate to see the ophthalmologist for relief. When my appointment date finally arrived, the lady at the desk couldn’t find that I had an appointment. I told her that I wasn’t leaving until I had seen the doctor. She found he had time to see me, after all.

The doc wasn’t particularly helpful or encouraging. After the exam, he told me that I had double vision. He said that the medical profession had little understanding of the causes, that people my age suddenly developed the condition for unknown reasons, that sometimes it would go away without treatment. He went on to explain that you don’t really see with your eyes, that the eyes act as a simple conduit for an electrical impulse sent to your brain. “The problem provoking double vision is likely a failure of one of the nerves that control the movement of the eye and hence its ability to focus,” he said.

He didn’t seem particularly hopeful. But he did offer some helpful advice. “Cover up one eye,” he said. “You can buy a pirate’s patch or put black tape over one eyepiece of an old pair of glasses. Oh, there’s one other thing. I have a friend who specializes in double vision. He often treats children who have lazy eye. I’ll make an appointment for you.”

The doctor’s advice was better than I realized at the time. I put tape over an old pair of glasses to obscure the vision of one eye. I learned that black tape wasn’t needed – Scotch tape of the kind used everywhere around the house worked fine. The texture of the tape obscured vison enough such the covered eye simply quit sending an image to the brain. The result was a clear, but somewhat limited vision. It brought immediate relief. Although I could only see out of one eye and I lost approximately 30 % of my peripheral vision on one side, it was a relief to see a single image. With the blurred eye-piece on one side of the old glasses, no longer did I endure the problem of two cars seeming to come at me, one down a hill, and the other in its normal position on the lane opposite me; a condition to be avoided at all costs. My wife took over most of the driving chores.

Suddenly we had a single TV in our living room, and it looked a great deal better than having two, one atop the other. Books and newspapers were finally readable again. I got in the habit of wearing the strange looking glasses everywhere. I explained about 1,500 times to friends that I wasn’t wearing broken glasses for no reason, that the culprit was double vision. One of the consequences of single eye vison is the loss of depth perception. Playing pickleball became problematic since one’s focus on the ball relies on both eyes seeing and recording its position.

The date for my appointment with the double vision ophthalmologist finally arrived. This doctor explained the same circumstance about the medical profession having little understanding about why the double vision thing suddenly was thrust upon me. But then he gave the good news. “I think it will go away without any intervention. About 95% of the cases that occur in folks your age simply go away on their own. Come back and see me in six weeks.”

I made an appointment to see the doctor, not in the six weeks he suggested since I was then recovering from hip replacement surgery, but rather in nine weeks after the surgery was complete and healing had begun. I still had the double vision. At this follow up appointment, the doctor was a bit less optimistic. “Come back and see me in two more months,” he said, “and we’ll see how you are doing.”

One day my vison was better. Not all better, but definitively improved. I haven’t worn the blurred glasses for a month now, and I have nearly no reoccurrence of the double vision. I think it is over. The doctor appears to have been correct about the unaided cure. It’s a big relief to see clearly again, and I have a new-found sympathy for those folks who are forced to live with double vision or other vision issues.

By the way, did I tell you to stay away from strabismus?