can't sleep. was reading "my sister's keeper", and when i went to bed, i realized my right eye couldnt see anything. which reminded me, i forgot to use my right eye. very few people know about this, cos i dont think theres a need for me to say it out, and partly also cos i feel ashamed. especially when some pple notice it, and say my eyes "pajiao". lol.
went thru many operations since i was a baby. but the doctors just couldnt get it right. mount elizabeth, gleneagles, sgh. spent lotsa money, but nothing could be done at all. and the worse thing was, i gave up on myself. i stopped patching my eye. it broke my parents heart, all their efforts went to waste. i was easily irritated, whenever my mum kept reminding me to use both eyes. i threw away all the eye patches. everytime i went to the doctor, i got frustrated. trying to look at 3d pictures, lifting the housefly's wings. everything became a routine. each session cost a few hundred bucks. each time i went home with bags of eye patches. i even remember one orthoptist's name, Dr Pauline Cheong from gleneagles. haha she was very very nice. but i stopped going for my appointments. i guess that was when i decided that i had had enough.
there were several times, after operations, i would wake up to go pee. when i looked in the mirror, i would see a girl staring back at me. her eyes were swollen, and could only open a little. u couldnt see her eyes. all u could see were just blood slowly dripping from those slits. it was sick. and for me, it was horrifying. cos that girl was me.
i guess now im ok with having double vision, cos i'm so used to it. but i wish.. maybe just for a day, that my eyes would be normal, that i dont have to strain my eyes to look straight. mum made me make a pair of specs, the lens are sort of triangular. i duno how to say it la. lol. but its supposed to help me correct my double vision. but i get bad headaches when i wear it. its straining my eyes, frustrating me, and i kinda feel like giving up. but i dont wanna break their hearts again..
anyways, its not something serious, cos i think lasik can correct it? duno lah. just feeling frustrated now.
jia you jia you! :D
STRABISMUSThe cause of strabismus is unknown, and indeed it probably has more than one cause. In some cases, strabismus comes on shortly after birth, during the first few months when in humans the eyes would just be starting to fixate and follow objects. The lack of straightness could be the result of an abnormality in the eye muscles, or it could be caused by a derangement in the circuits in the brainstem that subserve eye movements.
Strabismus can be treated surgically by detaching and reattaching the extra-ocular muscles. The operation is usually successful in straightening the eyes, but until the last decade or so it was not generally done until a child had reached the age of four to ten, for the same reason that cataract removal was delayed—the slight increase in risk.
Double vision can be most annoying and incapacitating, and if no better solution is available, a patch may have to be put over one eye. The double vision otherwise persists as long as the strabismus is uncorrected. In a child with strabismus, however, the double vision rarely persists; instead, either alternation or suppression of vision in one eye occurs.
When a child alternates, he fixes (directs his gaze) first with one eye, while the nonfixating eye turns in or out, and then fixes with the other while the first eye is diverted. (Alternating strabismus is very common, and once you know about the condition, you can easily recognize it.)
The eyes take turns fixating, perhaps every second or so, and while one eye is looking, the other seems not to see. At any instant, with one eye straight and the other deviating, vision in the deviated eye is said to be suppressed. The scene simply disappears for the suppressed eye. A child who alternates is always suppressing one or other eye, but if we test vision separately in each eye, we generally find both eyes to be normal. Some children with strabismus do not alternate but use one eye all the time,suppressing the other eye.
When one eye is habitually suppressed, vision tends to deteriorate in the suppressed eye. Acuity falls, especially in or near the central, or foveal part of the visual field, and
if the situation continues, the eye may become for practical purposes blind. This kind of blindness is what theophthalmologists call amblyopia ex anopsia. It is by far the commonest kind of amblyopia, indeed of blindness in general.
