Strained Eyes

Today I was volunteering at the local elementary for about three hours. This is one step of many toward getting back to work full time. I did two hours' worth of copying and an hour of paper-correcting, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Nice school, nice kids, nice staff. Good morning.

My neuropsychologist had warned me against going to the school for quite so long and then off to vision therapy for another hour because he said it would absolutely wipe me out for the rest of the day.

He was right about that. Even after a nap I still feel queasy and I'm not going to be online for long because it literally hurts to look at the screen. I don't know how else to build back up toward working full time again, though. The doctor and I will be discussing this further.

In vision therapy it was discovered that my left iris sits minutely higher than my right iris, which the therapist says may be the key to what's been going on with my eyes. 

Eye problems are common after car accidents because if you get hit from the rear your brain splats up against the front of your skull, while if you get hit from the front the brain will slap back against the occipital lobe, which is the center that controls eye movement. I was hit on the right side and then the back, and so have been having trouble with converging and diverging, focusing up close and then far away. The eye muscles are weak and get easily tired, which results in dryness and aches in the sockets.

This Iris thing is something the Therapist might never have figured out if I hadn't come to her feeling really tired already (Ha! Mr Neuropsychologist!), because it caused my eyes to move less fluidly. The left eye didn't really want to converge at all, which explains why I've had shooting pains in my right eye all afternoon -- It's doing the work of the left as well as its own. Noticing the left and having heard me complain of the pain in the right, she took a picture of my eyes and then measured them out. There it was, right on her iPad -- my left eye does not line up with my right eye, so when the two separate images converge there's not an even overlap, resulting in blurred vision.

The Therapist is going to have the Behavioral Optometrist take a look when he comes in sometime this month.

If this should turn out to be the case, then all I would need to fix it would be to have a prism put in my lense. Yay!

I wonder sometimes what it must be like not to have glasses. I've been wearing them since I was seven.

Chances are people who wear prisms probably can't do contacts.

This is my take on what getting therapy for your eyes is like...

All the same, it's most likely good news and has been a good day.