Friday, October 27, 2006

I Don’t See With My Left Eye...

When I tell people this they often watch me in a combination of disbelief and amazement.
Cause the people who know me, know that I can spot the smallest thing for far away (I prefer no to say maco) and my eye for detail is so keen it upsets even me.

But I guess that’s not completely true… I can see colour and shadows with my left eye.
But I can’t see it if I look straight ahead. When I close my right eye and ‘use’ the left I have to turn my head slightly to the left for me to see anything directly in front of me/the eye.

The earliest I can remember not seeing ‘normally’ is when I was about 6 (not too sure about that) and I remember asking mummy and daddy why did they make binoculars with two sides if you only use one. That kinda opened the flood gate and opened their eyes (haha!) to the fact that maybe their cute little baby girl (what?! I was!!) may have had a problem.

At the age of about 8 I think it was, I was diagnosed with optic atrophy:



Optic atrophy is the loss of some or most of the fibers of the optic
nerve
[1].
In medicine, "atrophy" usually means "shrunken but capable of regrowth", so some
argue that "optic atrophy" as a pathological term is somewhat misleading and use
"optic neuropathy" instead. The optic nerve is part of the brain and has no capability for
regeneration. Hence, there can be no recovery from optic atrophy and the term
may refer to serious or mild, but always irreversible visual loss due to damage
to the optic nerve. www.wikipedia.com

Test after test later, from blood test (dat big eye nurse in POSGH dred!) to this test where they put my head in a chamber thingy with flashing lights to test your range of vision (it was later determined that the right eye has NO blind spot) to everything in between. I did it all.

Surgery could be done (we were told this a little later when I was in Secondary School and becoming increasingly self-conscious) but it would just be cosmetic.
i.e. they could realign/straighten the eye, but I still would not have vision in the eye and the surgery was 50/50. It may or may not stay straight.
OH! And because it's considered cosmetic surgery it couldn't be claimed on any medical plan.


SO…20 or so odd years later, I am thinking (seriously this time) of getting some advice and get the surgery done…possibly abroad (by Uncle Fidel or Uncle Hugo...I hear they're good and affordable).
I would like to get the laser eye surgery to fix the can’t-remember-which-sightedness in my right eye, as well as looking into fixing the atrophy and/or straightening the eye for ‘cosmetic’ purposes.

And yes…I am still extremely self conscious about it.
And yes...it still bothers me 20 years later.

3 comments:

Hottie Hottie said...

Ummmmm....oKAY! Interesting blog by the way. Will be visiting regularly.

Hottie Hottie said...

Want to do the surgery myself. It's going to cost me a little less than 2,ooo pounds to do it up here. I doh mind though, anything to avoid that waking up in the night to pee and bouncing meh big toe or kyah find meh glasses.

afro chic said...

Thanks for visiting.

I hear is about TT$10,000 to do the surgery in Venezuela by Uncle Hugo.