Keriosity

So I’ve had these bad headaches almost daily for months now and after blood tests, an MRI, a visit to a neurologist, tons of different headache medications, and a visit to the opthomologist - the latest theory of the cause of these headaches is: I have a weakness in the muscles of my eyes, so even though my vision is just fine - I have a hard time converging objects that are within reading distance of my eyes. Eyes really gross me out, so this hasn’t been a fun process. The details are boring and I won’t belabor you with them - but here are some interesting items on this subject…

- My problem was probably caused by the jarring of my eye muscles whenever I get clocked in the head by a big dog at work. This happens about once every two or three months. Most people with this convergence problem have eyes that are slightly misaligned with each other. Mine are the very rare “perfectly aligned” eyes (yes I’m bragging. I have perfect eyes.) so an injury probably caused it. In this case - dogs beating me up. Hey, I wonder if I could get workers’ comp?

- To fix this problem, I have to undergo eyeball physical therapy. Well that’s not the official name, but that’s what I’ve been calling it. I saw an “Orthoptist” yesterday - she specializes in treating disorders of the eye muscles. She gave me exercises to do. Eyeball exercises. I have to do eyeball exercises as many times a day as I can for 4 weeks. Then she will give me different eyeball exercises. Now I know you are imagining “Ok, look left, left, left, left and right, right, right, right,” because that’s what I envisioned but actually it’s just a piece of paper with a line down the middle and a red dot on the line. I have to hold the paper so that it’s perpendicular to my face and touching the bridge of my nose. Most people will see one dot and two lines, but I see two of each and so I have to practice focusing them into one dot and two lines and holding it for 10 seconds at a time. Anyway, the point is - it looks ridiculous with me holding a paper to my nose and then staring at it cross-eyed, but I have to do it many times a day.

- This exercise reminds me of an interesting fact. You know how bird eyes are on the sides of their faces so they have great peripheral vision? Well one of the ways you can subdue a chicken is to draw vertical line in the sand in front of them. Since they, (like me), have convergence problems due to such crazily aligned eyes (not like me, remember - mine are perfect), they can’t tell if it’s one line or two lines and they stare at it trying to figure it out. While they are distracted by the line, you can pick them up and restrain them. We learned this in veterinary technician school. And it works. This makes me not want to do my exercises in public (as if looking silly wasn’t a good enough reason) because while I am trying to turn two dots into one dot - I could get mugged or something.

So long story short - dogs beat me up which made me have the eyesight of a chicken, so now I need eyeball physical therapy.

I was dying to do this practical joke. A few weeks ago, we removed an eye from a dog (ew, I know) and my boss keeps it in a jar and named it Irene. I thought it would be fun to show up to the eye therapist with a patch over one eye, hand her the jar and say “can you fix this?” Or, I could start doing the eye exercises and when she’s not watching, throw Irene on the floor, squint my eye and exclaim “OOOOW! I think I did that one wrong.” That would be fun. Ew but Irene is so gross, I couldn’t do those jokes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Stuff I did. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.