For many years now, I have struggled to explain some of the ways
damage from a head injury has distorted my vision, but I have always
felt that words cannot convey the picture as clearly as I would
like, so I have now put together some photos for our photo album to
literally show what the world looks like with some of these vision
problems.
Nine years ago, as a result of a head injury, I started having
horrible vision and health problems. I was diagnosed with monocular
and binocular diplopia. In everyday terms, that means double vision
in each eye and two eyes that refuse to work together. In addition
to that, I lost the ability to focus my eyes.
The best doctors, neurologists, opthamologists and optometrists
all agreed that the damage was permanent and that NOTHING could be
done to help restore my vision, except progressive prescription
lenses, and even that would leave 90% of my vision problems
uncorrected. Even with glasses, my vision was impossibly messed
up. My brain simply couldn't coordinate the vision process
anymore. With my eyes wandering off in their own directions, my
brain tried to make sense of it all by jumping wildly between the
view from both eyes when they were working together to a distorted
blended view from both wandering eyes or it simply relied on the
input from my left eye or right eye or nothing at all. What a
headache that was--literally it caused a permanent migraine.
After about 4 years of "living" with this, the literacy librarian
at our local library suggested that I contact the Irlen Institute.
My doctors were completely against the idea, but I refused to let
them keep me from getting the help I needed. Thank God I did because
with Irlen filters, I CAN FINALLY SEE NORMALLY AGAIN!!!
With all of the years that I have struggled to explain the
vision problems I have had, I have found that words alone fail to
adequately convey the nature and scope of the problems I lived with
so I have finally found a way to put together some pictures so
people can see what I mean, instead of just having to create a
mental picture from my words.
I have uploaded the pictures to the group photo album. I am
really hoping that they will be helpful to others.
They are best viewed in the slide show which sort of animates
them so you can see the effect all "in action". The first 7 pictures
in the slide show show the effect of double double vision on print
and the 8th picture shows the distortions it can cause even with
faces. (Yes, I picked Pablo Picasso as my model because I couldn't
help wondering if some of his "impressionistic" style was the result
of Picasso painting the world just as he REALLY saw it.)
I hope my illustrations will inspire some of you to find a way to
visually demonstrate how light sensitivity affects your vision and
share it with us by posting your pictures in the group photo album.
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/glimmercoloredfilterglasses/slid
eshow?&.dir=/&.src=gr&.view=t