“You don’t blink.” This was Dr. Goddard. Over the past forty-minutes he treated me with a blend of distrust and annoyance. Now he suddenly seemed empathetic, maybe even friendly. “How many did you count Susan?”
“Right, half blinks. I blinked fifty times over the seventy seconds I timed.”
This epiphany came near the end of a frustrating ophthalmological appointment with an internationally renowned strabismus specialist.
Strabismus? Double vision.
It’s been a life-long problem for me—two surgeries and about thirty pairs of glasses to combat my ever-changing vision. It isn’t the clarity, although that sucks too. My eyes don’t point in the same direction. They are constantly drifting apart.
I hoped my 2023 surgery would give me a two-or-three-year break from this problem. It did when I had last had surgery in 1997. After my recent surgery, after a few months to let my eyes settle down and get used to their new alignment, I got my current pair of glasses. This was late October. By January my double vision kicked in again, primarily when my eyes get tired. Sometimes in the morning, occasionally in the middle of my workday, and every night when I sit down to read or write.
Goddard graciously squeezed me in. Two months rather than his normal six-month wait.
I brought Susan for moral support. I dreaded this appointment for weeks. Ophthalmologists make me feel stupid. “Which is clearer? One? Two? Again. One? Two? C’mon, one of them has to be better. One? Two?”
Because my double vision is intermittent and usually only an issue at night, he seemed to doubt my concern. “Is this better or worse?”
“Um, I can’t tell. I don’t have double vision right now.” He scoffed and shook his head. I looked over at Susan and tried to telepathically beam my thoughts into her brain: See what I mean, he thinks I’m an idiot.
I’ve been through appointments like this countless times. There are plenty of ways to diagnose and correct double vision without me weighing in on what I’m seeing.
“Your eyes have shifted a bit since we made these glasses, but not enough to cause the symptoms you’re describing. Cover your ears, I want to talk to your wife privately.”
Yes, please do that, I thought, I want you to convince her I’m losing my mind.
Goddard asked me to read aloud from a piece of paper. This terrifies me. Years ago, in a staff meeting, I needed to read a description of my Meyers-Briggs assessment to the rest of the management team. Because of my double vision, the words jumbled. I read in a stumbling, halting voice, sounding very much like a fourth grader struggling through a challenging reading assignment.
Dr. Goddard and Susan both sat right in front of me to watch me read, adding to my discomfort. It went well though. I only got tripped up by a couple of random thees and thous in the Olde English passage. That’s when they brought up the blinking thing.
“Your eyes are drying out because you rarely blink when you read. This will cause the double vision symptoms you’re experiencing.” He prescribed over-the-counter eye drops and encouraged me to try to blink more frequently.
I’m skeptical. I’ve suffered from strabismus for thirty years. It seems too coincidental that after I got my vision surgically repaired, I developed intermittent double vision because my eyes are simply dry. Still, the eye drops do appear to help.
After the appointment, Susan assured me that Goddard wasn’t frustrated by me. “He was just puzzled by what he was learning.” I think Goddard summed things up nicely in his appointment notes. If these measures don’t work, I can certainly see him back, but I don’t have any other new ideas to offer at this time.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
