Acommodative esotropia
Hi everybody!
My name is Dave and I'm new to this forum (and also not native English speaker, so be patient with me :-) ).
Recently after discovering Susan Barry's book, I started to think that what seems unreachable is not impossible. When I was 1.5 year old, i had terrible fever which caused that my eyes started to wander . Since then I had 5 surgeries, where the final effect was pure estetical. My brain has never learned to use my both eyes together. Until i was 15 years old, i was wearing glasses which helped my eyes look straight. But anytime i put off my glasses, my right eye jump to my nose. Since my 15, I'm wearing contact lenses. My diagnose is amblyopia and accomodative esotropia which was probably the consequence of my hyperopia.
Sue's book filled me with hope that maybe is not everything lost. I used to have depressions when i was younger. Now I'm 20 and i believe that i can change what was given to me - my fate to live in non-3D world. I'm hell-bented not to fail, decided to fight with this illness to the end of my life. I believe that my brain can be retrained to use my eyes properly.So I started to gaining information that can help me. And thats also why I'm here. I need to know how to look with my both eye on the one point.
I started to analyze my sight. My illness is very strange. When I normally look, my brain prefer the good left eye. So the left eye is then straight and right turns inwards. But I can switch them. I can look through the right eye and then the left eye turns inwards. But through my right eye i see blured world and i cant focus very well. After wearing contact lense on just my left eye, my eyes look straight just like with the lenses on my both eyes. I just don't get it. In conclusion it looks like that my good left eye is responsible for turning my right eye inwards! Have somebody any experience? Is that the consequence of my amlyopia?
Recently I read some article about LASIK operation. There was mentioned that is possible to correct or semicorrect strabismus caused by hyperopia. I also consider this as an option, but i would rather try to continue without surgery. What do you think?
I have never talk about this to anybody and know i think it is time to change it. If you have any advices or experiences or information or everything, do not hesitate to write to me. Thank you for your time and feedback. As i mentioned before, failure is not in my dictionary so i'm not gonna give up.
Dave
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Sue Barry on -
Dear Dave,
First of all, you are not alone. There are many others who have similar experiences both with their vision and with the emotional consequences that result from strabismus. I think your observations of the way you use your eyes is very astute. Since your eyes are not aligned, if you were aware of both of their input at the same time, you would experience double vision and visual confusion (seeing two things that are separated in space as if they were located in the same place in space). So when you use (fixate with) your left eye, you turn in your right eye. By turning it in, you can turn it off or suppress its input and thus have a single view of the world.
You may indeed be able to improve acuity in your right eye and learn to use your two eyes together through optometric vision therapy, but you need to find a behavioral/developmental optometrist who works with people with strabismus. These eye doctors are different than the ophthalmologists who perform surgery. If you let me know where you live, I'll asked optometrists I know well for an appropriate optometrist in your area. If you prefer, you can send me an email at stereosue@gmail.com .
All best, Sue Barry
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Waranowski on -
Hi Dave.
Your situation is almost exactly the same as mine. We both have esotropia. Looking with one eye causes the other to turn inward. Of course, you can switch between the two eyes.
The only difference between you and me, however, is that I don't have amblyopia. Both of my eyes are 20/20.
So, although I'm not a vision therapist, what I imagine that you'd need to do in order to develop stereopsis is to have both of the eyes as 'regular' as possible--that is, have vision in both eyes as function as individual units as best as possible, and then you can begin to focus on getting them to fuse together and become properly integrated with one another.
There are three main things you have to do once you get the hyperopia thing under control and both eyes are well function on their own.
1. Become aware of the 'other' eye--the lazy eye. Begin to gain control of it, and realize that you can converge and diverge, and try to track onto objects.
2. Begin to fix the alignment issues you likely have (especially vertical alignment) with prisms.
3. Once the alignment is at least somewhat under control (this might not happen completely until you begin fusion exercises), then you can begin fusion (anti-suppression exercises.
I'm near the end of my vision therapy journey. I've been doing it for about 2.5 years and I feel like I'm about to have full-on stereo function. Realistically, in the end, you'll be doing all three of those things simultaneously.
In order to realize you have control of your other eye, you can start to do Brock string, and do plenty of stretches in all directions. Notice the way your eye muscles feel and then soon you'll be able to activate those muscles on their own and be able to move that eye in concert with the other eye. So you can sort of do these exercises and gain control of that eye at any time. You'll begin to notice diplopia at this time, and you'll be able to put the visual input information on top of one another. This is the end goal: to get control of the eye and get rid of the diplopia.
The second part with fixing the alignment issue you can do with bar prisms. You can get a prism set on Ebay. Probably other places as well if you Google it. I found 7 diopters to work the best for my workouts. So I'd often go out for walks (walks are good because looking out in the distances requires that you diverge your eyes) and use the prism upside down (so that the fat part of the prism is up with the skinny part down). And then I'd try to get the visual input to not be double. This forces the eye downward (because normally it is up, which causes the visual input on my lazy eye to look down from my perspective). I would do that, and I would also do that to ameliorate the esotropia, so that actively trying to circumvent the diplopia forces the lazy eye outward (so that it's not turning in). You can mix these exercises too. So I would sometimes use prisms while doing the Mardsen ball as well. A really good exercise in addition to this is object-tracking exercises.
http://www.kodyaz.com/html5/html5-canvas-demo-bouncing-ball-example...
This is a blue ball bouncing around the screen. Increase the size of the browser (ctrl+) so that the bouncing ball takes up the whole screen. Try to track the ball with both eyes. Try to make it so that you can track it relatively easily by looking straight at the screen. Once that gets easy, try loading the exercise by looking at the screen obliquely. Once that gets easy, try turning your eye down, so that you're looking up. The point is to make it hard and then build up the ability to track it at all angles.
Once you have reasonably good control of the eyes, then you're ready to start fusing the input of the eyes. The only exercise that I've found to be useful here is a bar reader. You can get one here.
http://www.oepf.org/products/category/anti-suppression-activities?p...
It comes with filter glasses. Then read books. I use a 500 lumen LED light hanging from my ceiling fan to provide the extra light that is absorbed by the filters. This bar reader forces you to use both eyes simultaneously. Try to consciously use the other eye as well and every once in a while stop and try to view the whole page so that there's no black. Black means that you're suppressing. If you're using both eyes, the filter glasses will generate a golden color (luster) when you're looking at white parts (and red on red parts, and green on green parts). If you keep at this exercise, you'll notice that your brain begins to fuse the input and the white things you look at will become luster. When I began doing this, I only noticed red with my dominant eye and green color being at some other vague place.
Like I mentioned, this luster color is what you're going for. When you do notice this, it means both eyes are becoming integrated in the brain. You will begin to notice depth cues even if it's not full stereopsis. But you'll notice that you're getting some new kind of input that you didn't have before. If you keep doing the right exercises you'll notice this 'new kind of input' more and more, and it will get more intense, presumably until you're in full depth land. I often find that every time I have a good productive workout, the next day I will notice it. It's not always a result of that anti-suppression exercise. Sometimes it's a result of having greater control (when you develop better control of the lazy eye, there's less need for your brain to suppress the input from the lazy eye--remember that suppression is blindness imposed by the brain which is an accommodative thing).
Keep at it. Let me know whether you have any questions.
© 2013 Created by Rebecca Sherry.
