Behind Blue Eyes

Eyes. Windows to the world or windows to a person’s sole...depending if you are looking out or someone is looking in. My eyes are two faced. All my life I’ve been told how beautiful my eyes are as they are a deep rich blue. Beautiful as they are, they are uncooperative and have been since birth. I was born with strabismus. It is a condition where one or both eyes are turned inward causing lack of depth perception and double vision. I was cross eyed.

Three surgeries before I turned 5 were valiant attempts to correct my problem. They worked for the most part. My eyes are no longer crossed and I do not see double. However, play a game of catch with me and you will quickly notice that my depth perception is still lacking. Remember those “Magic Eye” pictures that were cool in the early to mid 90’s? You were supposed to stare at a bunch of colors or patterns and eventually an image would pop out at you. Not me! I could stare all day and nothing would appear. Attending a 3-D movie is a waste of money. I’ve tried several times. Still looks like a normal movie to me. So.....how do I drive and not get in fender benders you ask? I’ve never known any different. I never ever had depth perception so I don’t even know what I’m missing. My body has learned to navigate in a world without depth perception. For the record, I’ve only had two fender benders and neither were my fault. Ok fine, maybe one was a little my fault. Really it was the civil engineers who designed Target’s parking lot to have narrow aisles and the lady who decided to back up directly behind me as I was backing up. That’s another story though.

At age 15, I got glasses and shortly after, contacts. My eyesight was great but the muscles in my eyes were stretched and weak from the three surgeries in early childhood. Oh wait, let me back the train up here. I forgot to tell you my super awesome weird fact. The reason I have no depth perception is because my brain is not wired to use both eyes at the same time. So while both eyes see at the same time, the signal to my brain only comes from one eye at a time. I favor my left eye and when I use my left eye to see, my right eye gets lazy and wanders up and out. When I favor my right eye, my left eye wanders a bit as well but not as noticeable. I cannot tell when my eyes are not straight unless I look in a mirror. My glasses and contacts are over prescribed to keep my eyes straighter but it doesn’t always fix it. I often found myself embarrassed when I was a teacher and I would call on someone that I thought I was looking directly at but my eyes were not both straight and they student could not tell where I was looking.

I have grown accoustomed to my crazy eyes and don’t think much of their laziness anymore. Just for fun though, they’ve decided to spring a leak when I was getting chemo on more than one occasion. I had bleeds from the blood vessels on the back of my eyeball which caused small floaters in my vision. They were caused by very low platelets due to the chemotherapy. That’s all healed now.

After my stem cell transplant, my eyes decided to be the center of attention yet again. Apparently they felt the need to compete with my other side effects. My tear ducts went on strike. “Heck No, We Won’t Flow” was their chant. Not one tear.  Your body makes three kinds of tears: watery, mucus, and oily. My watery tear glads shut down. So while I can have a sheen on my eyeball and it appears to be wet, its the oil not the watery tears that whelm up and spill over when you cry. The mucus glands also work as I have lots of eye goobers. Bonus....eye boogers aplenty! How do I know I have no watery tears? Well, my “dry eye specialist” did a fun little test where he sticks a piece of litmus paper to my eyeball and I have to close my eye with it in there and hold it for 3 minutes. After the longest 3 minutes ever, the doctor comes in and checks how much of the paper has absorbed/changed color from the tears. Normal is around 15. My left eye was 0. Right eye was around 2. Dry eyes confirmed.

Doctor optimistically said that we have options. Option one was to put tiny little plugs into the drainage ducts so the little amount of tears produced would not drain out. Think about sticking a tiny birdseed into the eye of a needle and then make that 5 times harder. That’s about what had to be done.  Cool trick, but it didn’t work. Next option was to try all the various drops on the drugstore shelves. All helped some but none of them enough to improve my quality of life. I was miserable. Next up was perhaps the second most gruesome medical procedure I’ve endured. Second only to bone marrow biopsies. The doctor cauterized my drainage ducts. Yep. I could smell the inner corner of my eye burning and see the tiny billows of smoke and hear the sizzle. But before that party started, they had to numb the inner corner of my eyes. With a needle. Talk about a party starter. After all that, it didn’t even work.

Next option is where I am now and that is using sclera contact lenses. They are hard, big contact lenses that need to be put in with a plunger like object and filled with saline. It gets easier everyday but the dryness is still an issue. A parting gift left behind by leukemia. I recently say my eye specialist (the scleral lens specialist, because one eye specialist wasn’t enough) and she basically said that I’m out of options. This is as good as it’s going to get.  Looking at my eyes, they often look just fine and you’d never guess that it feels like someone sticking a hot stick in my eye each time I blink. Other times mybeyes look red and irritated as if I had Pink Eye. Very few people realize how much maintenance I deal with just to be able to see comfortably for a few hours each day.
“No one knows what its like .....behind blue eyes” -The Who


On the positive side, I can see. I can drive. I can read. It’s a lot of saline solution and drops and plunger and it hurts to blink almost all of the time. But today my 9 year old made a face and I saw his joy overflowing with his sillyness. My youngest decided to be a robot drummer and I was able to see it. My middle boy attempted “The Floss” and I nearly wet my pants laughing so hard. It’s good to see even if sometimes it’s painful. Even if sometimes it’s foggy  or blurry. Even if my eyes are dryer than a dessert and still don’t stay straight sometimes. They are my window to my world. And these eyes have seen a lot of loves.
“These eyes have seen a lot of loves....” -The Guess Who