happy eye news

[keryx]

I went to the contact lens tailor. We're just fitting my left eye for now, first by trying on contacts to get the right curve, then by doing the refraction thing where they figure out what your prescription is.

There were numbing drops and yellow dye involved. She now has the info to order contacts with that prescription and curve, but bigger & with different edges - essentially, made to fit me.

If your cornea is misshapen, light coming into your eye isn't perceived by your brain as "straight" [This is a vast oversimplification of physics and biology; play along with me.]. Over time, your brain just starts filtering out what it doesn't understand. Then it stops telling your eye to focus, since really there's just no point.

So. When you put in magic (very uncomfortable so far, but I'd find size 6 pants uncomfortable, too) fake-cornea lenses, it's really hard to see. It takes work. And after 20 minutes or so, your brain might just white-out the signals it's getting from the weird eye. Hrm. That's interesting.

The contact tailor asked what insurance I had, then said "Oh, do you work at Wilderness Office Park?" - apparently a) our insurance covers the whole process, yay and b) she knows this because several other Wilderness Office Park peeps have my same fairly rare condition. She said at least 20 this year, which is about 4 times the rate of occurence in the population at large.

Comments

[arovd.livejournal.com]

I smell a conspiracy!

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

whoah.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Something particularly whoa-worthy: when my brain substituted a white wall for the input from my left eye, I said this to the contact tailor. What she said? Oh. Usually it's black. It'll happen for awhile once we get you fitted, but it's normal & goes away.

BRAINS ARE AMAZING.

[doktor-jess.livejournal.com]

The way brains and eyes work together amazes me. I have a strabismus in my right eye that was never caught when I was a child. This means that my pupil points up and to the right ever so slightly. Because my brain couldn't put together the signals it was receiving from right eye with the signals from my left one, it just ignored the input from the right unless the left was closed.

I never noticed that I was essentially blind on my right side because my brain just adapted to it. Sure my depth perception sucks, but it wasn't like I was seeing a blank spot or anything.

My new eye doctor gave me glasses that force my right eye to focus properly, so I can see much better now and no longer get in car accidents b/c I can't see to my right. I <3 him for figuring out was wrong with my eyes.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

It's kinda cool, isn't it?

I'm glad your eye thing worked out well. Did you ever have the thing when you were retraining where your vision in that eye whited out on you? That was WEIRD.