My Crazy Lazy

I was born with crossed eyes.

When I was an infant I had 3 surgeries to correct my crossed eyes. It is challenging to straighten eyes because the surgeon can not be sure they are straight when he is working on them. He/she make his/her best guess.
My eyes were never perfectly aligned. If one's eyes are not straight, one will see double. The brain will learn to suppress one image to eliminate the double vision. So, all of my life I have only used one eye at a time. I see out of both eyes, but I alternate which one I use to focus and which one I suppress. This is so natural to me, that I didn't even know I did it until an eye doctor pointed it out to me when I was 25 years old.

I was so awesome in 9th grade that I could even look in 2 directions at once!My wandering eye (strabismus) was a little vexatious because people often thought I wasn't looking at them. When you give someone eye contact, you look at one of their eyes. So, I had a 50% chance someone I was talking to would think I was looking at him or her.
When I taught the children in Primary (at church), several times children became confused because they thought I was calling someone else their name. I was good with the names, just not with the looking. One day, I just explained my "Crazy Lazy" eye to the children. I brought in a pair of glasses with one red lens and one green lens for each child. I had them put on the glasses. They talked about how they could see both red and green at the same time. I then told them that when I put on the glasses I can only see red or green, not both at the same time. I explained that I only use one eye so the eye I am not using wanders away. I called this my "Crazy Lazy." If the crazy lazy wasn't looking at them, look at my other eye. When the children later seemed confused about whom I was addressing, I'd remind them to ignore the Crazy Lazy! :0) Fun times!!!

Soooo, I decided to try again for straight eyes!

Beware:
Below is a scary post-surgery photo! It's a red eyed monster!
BOO!!

So surgery #4 left me with eyes that drifted inward instead of outward. The surgeon, Dr. Brown, over-corrected on purpose. The hope was that as my eye muscles healed, they would pull my eyes back to the center------They didn't.

My tired old brain could not deal with the new inward position of my eyes. So, I had pesky double vision. In addition, for the first 2.5 weeks, I had a torsion problem with my right eye. Everything appeared to be tilted, like it was leaning. That was crazy but my brain worked that out on it's own! Phew.

So,the eye nurse, Lisa, worked with me on the double vision. She put a prizm on one of my glasses lens, The prizm would bend the light, which would move the image from that eye out of my view, so the double vision would disappear. I felt a bit nerdy wearing the funny looking, cloudy prizm. (But that's not unusual, huh, Molly?).
Three months after surgery #4, I had surgery #5! This time Dr. Brown only operated on my left eye. I woke up after the surgery a little disappointed that I still saw double. I came home, groggy from the anesthesia, and took a nap. I woke up a few hours later and looked at the clock. I was elated to discover that there was just ONE clock! Yippee!!

Ta Da! They're lookin' straight!

Today I had my 6 week post-op check-up. Everything looks good. I was a little concerned about how red the corner of my left eye still looks. Lisa explained that it could take up to a year for the scar tissue to completely heal, but it should continue to lighten all the time. Dr. Brown seemed sure it would eventually go white. I had a loose stitch that was stuck in my eye. It looked like an eye lash. but wouldn't come out. Dr. Brown put an anesthetic drop in my eye and removed the stitch with a tool. She said that removing the stitch should help the redness go away. It was a foreign body that was irritating my eye.

I am so excited!!! My eyes appear straight and my pesky double vision is gone!