Last night we went to a high school play—St. George’s was doing Fiddler on the Roof and our good friend Terry is wardrobe mistress (and creator) for most of the school’s annual plays. She showed us her lairs at intermission, and we tiptoed about the attic above the backstage: she’s the regular Phantom of St. George’s. All the props, the costumes—she’s a brilliant costumer: pity she’s never gotten into the con circuit!—
But my eyes went on me: I’ve been swearing I need to get my prescription adjusted: it’s been 2 years; and last night I began seeing the red lights separate from the white, and then increasing separate images, until at intermission I had to get out into the hall and put on my reading glasses and force my eyes into something like focus, because everything had gone blurry and my balance had gone iffy. Don’t be alarmed. It’s that a muscle defect doesn’t let my eyes work together in a normal way: usually I’m ok and can cope very well with a monofit contact which helps coordinate focus; but I think what happened was that eyestrain started to ‘unglue’ the images, and one eye was ‘helping’ out by picking out what was different from the other, ie, the red component of the lights. I was getting what in real life would have been a 3 foot separation in the images on-stage, and one was the red lights. By the next subdivision I was starting to pick up the blue lights, which meant the brain was processing like crazy trying to pick out info and make it make sense. By the wedding scene I had far more actors than I liked, so we ended up going home after the wardrobe tour. Jane and I don’t go out much—like not in months, she absolutely loves the theater, and here I screwed up her evening.
Well, I’ve lived with this problem lifelong: I recall the very first time it came to me that my world was odd: I was five, we were living in the house by the railroad track, and I was aware that things were ‘stacking up’. I came running into the house saying, “Mama, the cars are stacked on top of each other,” and she said that it was a car carrier. But when I said no, I knew what that was, she and I both went out onto the porch and I told her what I was seeing—which was the first time I grappled with the concept of seeing the universe in a different way.
So—old problem. And I have to admit I need a prescription for far vision: that hits me in the vanity—I’ve always had very good far vision. And one for near vision. Because I have a torque, or shift, between the progression of numbers for my far focus and my near, it means that even gradated bifocals won’t work, because it’s physically impossible to grind glass to do what I need. I have to have a separate prescription for each special distance at which I need to operate. Which means it’s a good thing I’m not male: someday I’ll run out of pockets to carry the glasses. Right now I wear one pair and will have to keep the others in my purse…I refuse to drape both on the necklace clip I use: vanity, vanity. One pair is bad enough.
Well, but I have generally good vision, just this ‘separating images’ problem, and am blind as a bat close up, so reading glasses are a must. So it’s off to the optometrist for me. I’ve tried several in town, and honestly, the one who serves the local Walmart is a real gem.
Bifocals arn’t bad, try trifocals. I have had them for 4 or 5 years and I still hate them. I am always shifting my head up or down to get the focus right. My Ophthalmologist wont let me go more than a year without a check up.
My husband has trifocals. It started when he was an active pilot and needed to look down, straight ahead and up for the over-the-head instruments. He prefers them to the graduated lenses.
For years my father had double vision, which he fixed by wearing glasses with little prism inserts in them. Eventually he saw a different eye doctor who said it was something about the muscles that move one of his eyes being weaker than the other eye’s. He had surgery that tightened up the muscles (which sounded like it was gross/creepy), and has been happily seeing only one of everything since.
(The gross part is, they have you awake after the surgery and have you look at things, and if you still have double vision they can adjust the surgery by pulling strings they left coming out of your face. But that’s only for that day!)
And cataract surgery is done with the patient awake! There is no real physical discomfort, but lying there while someone cuts your eye and removes a piece is distinctly discomforting.
Then … in a few weeks … they take the stitches out.
You have my complete empathy on eye trouble. Never fun, no matter what the eye issue is, and both vanity and a general alarm factor are surely there.
On the other hand, it’s in the 90’s here and drought conditions going on a solid month or more, with now a no-burn ban in place state-wide. There’s some slight chance of rain next week, though that could well be a wish more than a forecast. I’d gladly trade some cooler weather and nice precip for what we’re getting.
Even so, I think my first-time tomatoes, bell peppers, and green onions may be coming along fine. Radishes? Don’t know yet. — Going to try for basil too.
I hope the play was good and the kids had fun doing it. Neat on the costuming mistress.
It just started snowing again: heavily!
amblyopia – I found I had it in college after I completely shut off the vision in my left eye. I thought that it was normal to see double when my eyes got tired. My opthamologist muttered something about having watched the condition develop for some years me -WHAT CONDITION?). I hadn’t even been aware that I had lost any depth perception. He sent me to an orthoptist for physical therapy. Yep exercises for the eyes. I was so triumphant when I finally learned how to cross my eyes!
She started me with exercises using a point source of light and a red celophane patch over my nondominant eye. Apparently red is the hardest colour to repress.
That was 40 years ago and I have never had a recurrence.
I still occasionally cross my eyes to make sure that I can.
DH had brain surgery years ago. He came through it fine, but has a bigger blind spot than most people. Recently, he’s also started to have depth perception problems, again in the same eye with the blind spot. Eye problems are no fun!
Yep—all my life I’ve had problems with depth perception, as in—zip. When I was a kid (before the advent of tv in cars) I entertained myself by watching telephone poles and predicting by which pole an oncoming car and we would pass each other. It was a useful exercise: I still do it, in one form or another, to substitute for depth perception. I can appreciate 3-d only if I work at it. And pouring things—I use my finger, like a blind person, to position one glass relative to another. To pour from a pitcher—almost guaranteed that I’ll spill some. I’ve learned to approach that operation with authority, and to go for it: I spill less going for the broader target than trying to finesse it.
And reaching past things on, say, a cafeteria tray?
A friend of mine lost the sight in one eye; I tried to teach her little tricks—but I remember when she came back (we were both teachers) from surgery and we were in line in the cafeteria—she reached right past (she thought) a full glass of iced tea to get a dish of pudding off the line. Parallax…does not exist in a monovision world. I saw her reach, I knew it, I wasn’t in time: she not only overset the glass, she catapulted it into the display of food and none of us got any pudding. That’s par for the course. My intense sympathy: I know what it’s like, even if my vision loss or plane-of-vision distortion is intermittent depending on the angle at which I’m looking. My effect ranges from blackout of that side to warped vision in which the floor and everything on it curves up (the brain usually screens out that version, which is why black is the alternative view most of the time.) It’s an *interesting* world when you do it without stereoscopic vision. It’s possible if the blind spot is definable that the brain may learn to screen out the problem side at certain angles. Happened for me—not a blind spot, but a decided warp. If I look to the bad side, that side cuts out, censoring the warp, and the good side substitutes a monovision image. If I look to the good side, or slightly off—I get true stereoscopic vision.
We had a laugh when I went for an international driver’s license. Because of photometric face recognition built in, they had to get a true shot of me face on. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t. Physically: there is only ONE picture of me in existence appearing to be looking straight on, and it is now on my driver’s license: I had to get the photographer to tell me ‘when’ to freeze while turning my head, and it gives the illusion of being head-on. But I’m not quite ‘on,’ and I couldn’t see the photographer at all. People who look at the photo say it doesn’t look like me and most don’t know why. 🙂
Ah, the eye, a subject about which I know far too much. Ms. Cherryh, your comments about depth perception are very interesting. It seems that memory is a very important depth cue.I have very limited vision in one eye as a result of a problem 10 years ago, I’m OK past an arm’s length and one reason is that I know what it’s supposed to look like.
The human brain is a marvelous thing.
Phil Brown
One of the really curious questions I had when I started jumping in figure skating was what would happen when I launched myself into the air in a turn—you come out backward from the jumps I do, and I thought, gee, my world tending to warp ‘up’ on one side if I’m deprived of reference, and going somewhat weightless at one point of that action, while turning, can my brain sort this out?
The answer is kind of unsatisfying for the basic question of a simple waltz jump: yes, I can do it, But! —the process of jumping (glide on right foot, swing left foot back, then forward, pick-in (toepick engaged hard), —and you have pivoted, and the pick is your anchor: you turn sort of the way a truck would turn if you flung out an anchor and chain that caught something and stuck (the toepick). So balance has somewhat to do with it, but you’re overwhelmed by the physics of the thing. It’s a complex bunny-hop on one foot. So it’s not a real test of planar perception. A toe-jump is more so, because you 3-turn on the right foot, glide, pick in violently, and launch, coming down on the same right outside edge you started on: because you begin it in a turn and launch to rotate in mid-air, you’re much more reliant on your eyes and inner ear than you are in a simple waltz jump. Since I haven’t yet been able to do one of those two (toe wally and toe loop) off the wall, I can’t swear to it, but I do suspect one of my problems IS establishing where ‘level’ is. If you tilt in mid-air, you’re doomed: you can see it on telly, when a good skater gets to leaning too much—can’t find level again, especially in a multi-rotational jump. I’m at more than the usual handicap in that regard, which probably, la! means I won’t nail the quad toe loop. 😉
Re your weather CJ it doesn’t know what to do from day to day in Toronto either.
A recent comment sent to me seems appropiate.
INSTALLING SPRING…
███████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 44% DONE.
Install delayed….please wait.
Installation failed. Please try again.
404 error: Season not found. Season “Spring” cannot be located. The season you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please try again…
=
Cute! Wet and rainy down here in the Okies.
Hot windy and dry in the desert SW and especially in the high chapparal. My heart goes out to the Texans who have lost their homes due to the wildfires burning this season. We’re more than a decade into a southwestern drought with no real break anticipated in my lifetime.
Cold and rainy today on the North Coast. Eyes – I understand perfectly. I can’t wear contacts, so I’d be in deep kimchee if I had your problem. As it is, I’d be legally blind in my stunningly astigmatic left eye if it wasn’t correctible, and *just* really nearsighted in my right. I was so amused by your story about telling your mom what you saw. I didn’t get glasses until I was ten, at which point my mother was astonished to hear me say – “Oh, look! I can see the leaves on the trees!” (Knew they were there, didn’t realize most people could see them.) These days I have the distance glasses, the sunglasses, and computer glasses. (Can still read without glasses, but my arms keep getting shorter or something.) I can no longer see a movie in theatre without being very careful about where I sit, because the movement on-screen gives me vertigo (with unhappy results).
Ow. WOnder if Dramamine would help!
They’re trying something new with me — concentric bifocal contacts. This should be good. Right now my eyes are dilated as all get out and I’m a bit queasy from the light. I may just pack it in and go to bed for a few hours.
Snowing – Bren wants to take the whole gang to the mountains to ski.
Somewhere in an earlier book there was mention of Atevi fools going down the slopes in the Alps. I’m sure it was the dowager who used the term “fools”.
Hah, I believe Cenedi was of that opinion too.
Loved the “Season not available.” comment. *snicker*