A strabismic’s eyes are not aimed at the same point in space. The difference between the left- and right-eye views is too great for the brain to combine the images into a single picture. A person with non-aligned eyes is confronted with a serious perceptual problem; she must somehow create a single, coherent worldview from conflicting input from the two eyes. To solve this problem, many strabismics suppress the information from one eye and look through the other. Some always use the same eye, while others continually switch between the two eyes, but in either case, they may never see normally through the two eyes together. As a result, most strabismics have reduced or absent stereovision.
— Susan R. Barry, Fixing my Gaze
Spending time with the View-Master as a child was a deeply moving experience. But, after all, it was just a toy, and I was embarrassed enough about my strong emotional responses that I kept them to myself. I recall being so affected by the Flash Gordon reel that knowing there was a finite limit of images nearly brought me to tears. What was it about seeing those 3D impressions that was so profound? Was it because my natural depth perception was already deficient or in decline? I knew I wasn’t very good at hitting or catching a ball. Did I simply lack an athletic reflex, or could it have had more to do with an inability to place objects in space, a known characteristic of monocular vision? How flat has my world been all along?
Yesterday I went to the Vision and Learning Center for a battery of diagnostics that measured and benchmarked the current state of the eye disorder. I’m starting to get more comfortable with phrases like a) Vertical Strabismus (eyeballs out of alignment), b) Oculomotor Pursuits (something to do with how cognitive function enables the eye to move smoothly), and c) Binocular Fusional Disfunction (inability of brain neurons to coordinate dual-eye vision). Actually, it’s wrong to think of it as an eye problem. A “brain glitch” is probably a more accurate way to understand it. Some of the tests seemed ridiculously easy, while others were very difficult and exhausting for me to perform. At the end of my session came a discussion about the details of therapy, timetable, and costs. Once-a-week sessions at the Center for 30 consecutive weeks, plus daily home practice, 30 minutes minimum. For some reason, I wasn’t expecting such a long program, and the sticker price knocked me for a loop. I left with doubts about whether I could take on the economic commitment, even though I knew I had enough discipline to make the approach work. Dana and I had a long discussion. We kept arriving at the same conclusion: I simply had to get this fixed, and somehow we would manage our finances to pay for it out of pocket.