Strabismus and Stereovision-- our experience

My little 5 yr. old has had glasses since he was 9 mos. old. Our good eye doctor passed away a couple years ago, and I didn't like his replacement so it wasn't until last year that we found another one we liked. My daughter's vision was fine with her glasses, but my son was referred to a surgeon to because his eyes continued to cross even with the new glasses. That surgeon then referred us to a pediatric opthamologist because his eye muscles moved both side to side and up and down. The pediatric opthamologist was really nice and I'm sure totally competent, but he was also very honest about the fact that surgery may not solve my son's vision problems although it would help. But surgery was the only thing he was able to offer us at that time. I now had a name for my son's condition and hoping to avoid surgery I got on the internet and started reading about strabismus which led to learning about vision therapy.

Basically strabismus is where the eyes don't work together. The person can have double vision, or one eye will shut off and turn in or out. My son had developed a lazy eye because of the strabismus but his weak eye was strenthened by patching the strong eye and forcing him to use his weak eye, but now he was switching off eyes to see and not using them together which meant that he could not see in 3-D. It's different than the way we see with one eye because our brain is so used to seeing things in 3-D that when we close one eye we still see in 3-D, but for someone who has never used their eyes together, everything is flat like on a t.v. screen. It is explained very well in the book, Fixing My Gaze by Susan Barry. She gained her stereovision while in her 50s after a lifetime without stereovision. It is fascinating and it also helped me to understand what we needed to do to help my son and why vision theraapy may work for him,

There were 2 offices listed on the website in Utah, so I called and made an appointment with the one 45 min. away. She told me she would be able to help him after the surgery but she would not be able to help with the up and down movement. So I then called the office 1 hour away and I guess being board certified makes a difference because he thought he would able to help and studies show that a waiting 6 months to do surgery at my son's age wouldn't make that big of a difference so it was worth a try.

So I have been driving my 7 children down to the eye doctor 1 hour away once a week for 2 1/2 months now for vision therapy. Fortunately our insurance covers a lot of it-- we just have a $25 co-pay each session. The exercises they do are varied and interesting. I'll explain them some other time if anybody's interested. But they did an evaluation 2 weeks ago after 8 weeks of eye exercises at home and weekly visits in office and his vision has improved 1 line on the eye chart and now this week he told me that things are starting to "jump" out at him which means he is using both eyes together!!!

Yay!! I'm so happy for my little guy. I'm so grateful for people with effective tools to help us in this. I'm grateful to my Lord for showing me the way. We still have a ways to go, but what a relief. I think we are headed in the right direction and all the sacrifice is worth it!!