Squared Up Part I

I’ll give you the squeamish alert now.  Some photos and descriptions might be disturbing to some readers.  Or, it will get your rocks off.  I don’t know, or particularly care to know.

Since March of 1957, I’ve had an eyeball that is off kilter, the left eyeball.   As the left eye couldn’t see things, it never tracked with the right eye.

Last week, I had surgery to fix it.  This is the story of one eye being off target for all of my life, then squared up.

Back in the Day it was called Lazy Eye and the solution was to put a patch over the good eye and exercise the lazy eye to make it track with the good eye.  Look up, look down, look left, look right, repeat nine thousand times.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see out of the left eye, so all the ‘exercise’ was an exercise in futility. 

I was sent out to play wearing a patch on my good eye, which meant I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  Or doors, fences, trees, buildings or cars.  There was much bruising.  Again, back then, it was considered appropriate by the medical folks to "force’ the kid to use the eye, then it would magically work and line up.  The attitude was that children are wilful, evil little creatures who must be forced to do things, with a rubber hose to the soles of the feet if need be.  Fortunately things have changed since then.

After a few months of banging into things, the medical folks eventually figured out, despite me telling them repeatedly, that I couldn’t see out the left eye.  Blind as a bat.  No light, no shapes, no dark, or shadows.  Nothing.  The right eye?  Fine, but nearsighted.

Some science content here:  Stereoscopic vision, the ability to see in three dimensions is as much a brain function as an eye function.  The back of the eyeballs output data via the optic nerves to the optic chiasm, where a lot of the data crosses paths.  Essentially your right eye feeds the left side of the brain and the left eye feeds the right side of the brain.  Your brain puts the two slightly different pictures together and calls that reality in three dimensions.  The interocular distance, the distance between your two eyes, gives you the two slightly different images.

When you move your eyes to look at something, let’s say a car passing in front of you, the two eyes move at slightly different rates.  Every zillionth of a second the brain sends signals to the muscles to keep the two images approximately in sync and refreshes the combined image into a coherent picture. 

If you’ve ever had dental surgery, like a root canal, and had half your head frozen, you notice that your vision is impaired or blurry for a while.  One set of eye muscles is affected by the dental freezing and is out of sync with the unfrozen ones.  The brain can’t make a coherent image out of the input, because the two aren’t lining up within the range the brain can resolve. 

As a young’un, the two pictures that were being delivered to my brain were too far out of alignment for the brain to make sense of them.  So, the brain, being confused, said, "The left side data is pooched.  Screw it."  The brain, being a complex machine, stopped accepting input from the left side optic nerve.  

I never noticed it, being about 6 months old.  The left eye, over time, stopped tracking with the right eye as the brain didn’t need or want the input.  Parenthetically, my left eye is a real one, completely alive, as the pupil reacts to light, but there is no input from it that I can see, at least until last Friday.

What this means, is that I have never seen in three dimensions.  I have no idea what it looks like.  Since I have never seen it, I don’t miss it, much like someone born color-blind or deaf has no appreciation for what they have never known. 

Having said that, I must also explain that there are drawbacks to having monocular vision.  For example, catching a ball.  Billiards.  Pouring liquids.  Walking down stairs.  The list of things that are easier with binocular vision is long, but humans are remarkably adaptive animals.  Most of my adaptions are very subtle and you wouldn’t notice them, if you didn’t know.

For example, if I pour you a glass of wine, you might notice that I put the spout of the bottle on the edge of the glass, then pour.  If I didn’t, then there would be wine everywhere, except in the glass.  Walking down a flight of stairs, I always hold the handrail.  To me optically, the stair and my feet are in the same geometric plane so I don’t get the visual cueing that my foot is about to hit the stair tread.  I’ve fallen down too many sets of stairs for it to be entertaining anymore. 

As for catching anything?  Forget it, as I can’t see how far it is away from me to put out my hand to capture it.  You need two slightly different views of the flying object to allow your brain to calculate where, in space, the object is, to trigger your arm to put your hand predictively where the arc will end.  Without the second visual input, the brain can’t calculate the interception point accurately. 

Watching me play badminton is hilarious, golf is agriculturally funny as I dig divots, baseball is a nine-inning joke, volleyball an exercise in face-planting, along with gymnastics, lacrosse, football, hockey and rugby.  Skiing, be it downhill or cross-country is an endless loop of me falling over, while darts is dangerous for bystanders.  Snooker and 9-ball, two billiards games I love, are as visually puzzling as modern art to me.  Martial arts would be dangerous to all concerned, as I can’t see properly to pull the strike before hitting someone.

I tried playing Squash with a good friend many years ago.  I tried hard too, as I like it.  More than once I almost decapitated him with a mighty swing of the racquet to hit a ball that I thought was far enough away from his head to clear it.  I was wrong.  He’s since forgiven me for it, but at the time, I was mortified. 

Sports is one thing, but behavior and personality are another whole set of things that I have a different take on.  There is some scientific thought that the left hemisphere of the brain is the creative side, the literate, wordy, visual side of our personality.  The right hemisphere is the more mathematical, hardwired logical side. 

I am so mathematically challenged that I should have a blue parking pass from the Province of Ontario.  Grade 2 consisted of me being drilled in math for hours after school by my Father, usually ending in tears, yelling and screaming.  I still don’t know my times tables.  It took me three tries to get through Grade 9 Algebra.  Long division might as well be in Sanskrit. 

Cursive writing is right hemisphere and my handwriting is indecipherable at best, aside from being partially dyslexic.  Fortunately I have learned how to spot my common errors and rely on spell-checking programs.  I’ve used a typewriter then a computer for just about all my correspondence, as others can’t read my writing.  

I don’t actually know, instinctively, my left hand from my right hand.  Watch me give directions to someone and I’ll take forever, as I have to consciously do the turns, then figure out which direction it is by translating motion into Left or Right.

Math and handedness are right brain functions.  The biggest stimuli is visual in the human and the right hemisphere of the brain is fed by the left eye.  Perhaps this explains why I seem to be able to fling words with a modicum of mediocrity, but can’t add three numbers together without a calculator.

It isn’t all unpleasant.  I see what a camera sees, which explains why I spent about ten years in television as a director and photographer.  The illusion you see as depth on television or film is created with lighting.  I can’t be fooled by binocular vision into thinking things are correctly lit, so I was a pretty good shooter in my day on film and tape.  I can still get off the occasional good shot with the camera. 

Even stranger is my previous history in flying and racing, two activities one would think would absolutely need depth perception.  Technically, they do, but I’ve got eight hours in fixed wing, single engine aircraft and sixteen hours in gliders.  Laps racing?  More than several thousand and I wasn’t that bad a racer either.  

You learn different cues to make up for the cues that others use naturally.  When driving, I always do the three-count thing.  Watch the car in front of you on the highway pass a fixed object, count to three and you should be passing the same object.  Less than three and you’re too close. 

When driving I have my head turned slightly left, to center up my right eye and cover all three mirrors.  I don’t know how I learned it, but that’s what I use.  I can extrapolate position from shadows, perhaps better than you can.  Again I don’t know how I learned it, but that’s what I use.

To bring it all together regarding binocular vision, just for giggles, cover your right eye and try to walk across your living room, only using your left eye.  You will bang a shin, or fall over or wind up behind the sofa on your head.  It’s hard for you because you’re used to having the two visual inputs that you see as depth.  

As a child it was hellish.  Male children in the 60’s were all about sports as the determining social hierarchy marker.  So was physical appearance.  With one eye pointing inwards and a basic stick and ball ineptitude, I was a castaway.  There aren’t many photos of me, as I instinctively avoided cameras.  For some reason I was always away when school photos were being taken.  Cyclops was a common playground taunt, along with Spaz, Freak and Dumbo. 

Growing older I adjusted, sort of.  There are a few pictures of me out there.  When I could, I would make sure that I was far enough from the camera that it was hard to see the left eyeball being off.  What few formal portraits of me that exist, give me the heebie jeebies when I see myself.  The bathroom mirror looks somewhat back at me, kind of, but not quite.

As a trainer I used to make mock of it.  If I pointed to someone at the back of the class and the guy four seats to the right answered, I’d point to my right eye and say "Not quite, try this one, as it’s the one I use all the time." then laugh.  After all, you can laugh or you can cry and laughter is easier, at least in public. 

Inwardly, I cried and got reminded of it, every morning, in the bathroom mirror.  I have overheard others describe me as the "guy with the eye".  Oh well. 

Is a wonky eye a definer of me?  Perhaps.  I know I have learned more about visual acuity, spatial relationships, perception and some rudimentary biology because I have tried to understand the why of how I see what I see and how others see what they see.

In the next posting I’ll get down to brass tacks regarding the operation.  There will be a before and after picture or two.  No shot of during, although I was tempted to ask for one.