Touching the World with Your Eyes: Part 2

Today, I would like to introduce you to Cam.  Cam is an amazing young lady who is finishing high school and attending nursing classes. She has struggled with school, learning, and depth perception all of her life. I encouraged her to come and have an initial examination to determine if vision could be the underlying cause of her struggles. Cam came and was diagnosed with Esotropia and mild Amblyopia.  

Cam has been faithful to her Vision Therapy journey for 31 weeks. Yet, though she could get larger fusional targets, like expanded Dog and Ring on the VTS4, she struggled with more central targets. Fusion Fred, Life Savor Card, and other fusion cards never seemed to lock in or take hold. Weekly, we seemed to get so close, and then it just did not happen. I know you all have felt that before with a patient. You feel for them and question, “What else can I do to help them?”

Together, we noticed that other activities still seemed to be guided by her non-strabismic/non-amblyopic eye. She also had a very closed posture with her esophoric tendencies, wanting to keep everything very close and within a tight working radius. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Each person’s reality is different because each person’s perception is different.” This is so reflected in Cam’s interactions with the world around her. 

So, last week, I introduced that same concept we talked about in our last blog. We need to touch the world with our eyes. Instead of just thinking about stretching our hand out to reach for an object, to think about our eyes reaching out and touching those things first.  We incorporated this into the Aperture Ruler Trainer (ART).  In previous sessions with the ART, Cam would struggle to get a single image, and if she did, it was fleeting. She also struggled with some suppression. When she did achieve fusion, it was very difficult for her to localize or get much depth.  So we began to approach it from the concept of allowing our eyes to go out to the target and to touch the target with her eyes.  My goal was to get her to change her internal perspective of where she gathers information.  Not from internal perception but from external vision.

“What you see depends not only on what you look at but also on where you look from.” – James Deacon

Cam did such an amazing job of grasping the change, and immediately she felt that it was different in how she moved her eyes and gained fusion. In just a few attempts, she achieved fusion, held it for ten seconds, briefly lost it, and then successfully regained it for another ten seconds. This was remarkable and brought a smile to her face as well as to my own. Where before we were stuck at card #1 or card #2 with limited success, she now was able to get all the way to card #5. We’ll know more next week about whether the concept has held, but this was a significant breakthrough for Cam, and her growing confidence was evident in both her smile and responses.

Such a simple phrase, and yet it seems to be making an incredible impact.  So, why not try it? See if you can touch the world with your eyes today!