eye wear

[CM1021]

I have started wearing contacts in the past year since wearing glasses since the age of 10. My glasses were getting in the way of shooting my bow and now I love my contacts. I have wondered about SHTF and eye correctiveness and I have talked to my dr and have extra contacts for a year right now. My doc said my eyes are finally starting to stabilize but he said that it will probably get worse later on in life.

Hey Lester did you happen to be born with optic nerve hypoplasia? My son was born with this and he is blind in his right eye. He is 3 and it breaks my heart when he will cover his good eye and say he can't see!! I would give up my sight if he could have two good eyes! The docs say that he won't know any different since he was born with it but I'm wondering what difficulties he will face in life with it. We can only put it in God's hands and take it one day at a time right now.

[Clod Stomper]

I have started wearing contacts in the past year since wearing glasses since the age of 10. My glasses were getting in the way of shooting my bow and now I love my contacts. I have wondered about SHTF and eye correctiveness and I have talked to my dr and have extra contacts for a year right now. My doc said my eyes are finally starting to stabilize but he said that it will probably get worse later on in life.

Hey Lester did you happen to be born with optic nerve hypoplasia? My son was born with this and he is blind in his right eye. He is 3 and it breaks my heart when he will cover his good eye and say he can't see!! I would give up my sight if he could have two good eyes! The docs say that he won't know any different since he was born with it but I'm wondering what difficulties he will face in life with it. We can only put it in God's hands and take it one day at a time right now.

Very, very sorry to hear about your son's eyesight. But, maybe I can reassure you. I was born mostly blind in my right eye. Enough so that it "wanders" if I'm not paying attention. I can see peripherally somewhat, but I don't use it for forward vision.

Your doctor is correct. He will have very little difficulty. I have a bit more difficulty catching something thrown toward me because of lack of depth perception. But if you train him while he's young (playing catch, etc.) as my Dad did, it will help immensely.

Watching a 3D movie does nothing for me. But in real life, I can "sense" depth. Sometimes, I will unconsciously move my head side to side slightly to get a sense of depth. Not so much now as I used to. I'm 39 years old, BTW.

I am not super accurate when it comes to judging distance. But I'm not much worse than most folks with 2 good eyeballs.

Advantages? I have absolutely no way of knowing if these are a result of being blind in one eye and compensating with the other, but...

- Straight lines. For example, I can build a fence as straight as an arrow. I can detect an almost imperceptible "crookedness" in something. Gun barrels, for example.

- Last time I was checked, I have 20/15 vision in my good eye. I can read signs farther away than others.

- I am a naturally good shot. Formal training helped even more, though.

Some suggestions. Obviously, protect his good eye at all costs. Don't let him do stupid things like trying to see how a stapler works by looking at the staples while squeezing the lever. Ask me how I know.

Don't let him sock himself in the eye by pulling something, such as a wrench, toward his face while loosening a bolt. Ask me how I know.

Don't let him shoot a BB gun at anything close while not wearing eye protection. Ask me how I know.

As you may have guessed, I am very lucky to still have one good eye.

Teach him from the beginning to shoot left-handed. My family tried to get me to shoot right-handed when I was little. I couldn't see the sights. Duh. Now, shooting a long gun lefty is perfectly natural for me because I've been doing it since soon after I could walk.

Teach him to wear eye protection almost all the time. I do. Good (read: not cheap) sunglasses during the day. Clear lenses at night if doing anything more risky than watching TV.

I know how it must be to know your son will only have one good eye while growing up. I remember my Mother telling me that my Papaw said the same thing about me. He would have given up both his if I could have two good eyes. But, it really isn't a tragedy as long as he doesn't lose the good one. And how would my Papaw (and you, with your son) have taken me hunting, fishing and everything else if he had been blind? I wouldn't trade those memories for another good eye.

My wife is expecting our first child right now. Gonna be a boy. I've been praying that he has two eyes that are as good as my one. That he has our brains, her intuition, her good looks, my strength, my protectiveness, my introversion, her extroversion (yeah, I know). And her Uncle's height.

That's all I can think of right now as late as it is. Please feel free to let me know if I can help with any other questions or concerns.

Will

Edited September 15, 2012 by Clod Stomper

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Hey Lester did you happen to be born with optic nerve hypoplasia? My son was born with this and he is blind in his right eye. He is 3 and it breaks my heart when he will cover his good eye and say he can't see!! I would give up my sight if he could have two good eyes! The docs say that he won't know any different since he was born with it but I'm wondering what difficulties he will face in life with it. We can only put it in God's hands and take it one day at a time right now.

Hi CM1021

I had a freakishly large head even as a fetus and the right eye got squashed at birth by the doctor's forceps as he was trying to haul me out. Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.

So it didn't look odd from the exterior, but had an oblong shape internally, had a long scar across the cornea, and a mis-shapen lens. The retina basically worked OK. The cornea and lens were too messed-up to allow good vision even with corrective glasses, but vision was good enough to be useful to avoid running into people on the right side. Legally blind in the eye though. I could for instance take a magnifying glass and read one word at a time with that eye, with a book a few inches from the face, but it couldn't be corrected good enough to read a page at a time.

They didn't have technology to do anything about it when I was a kid. Nowadays a kid with that problem could be repaired by replacing the lens as with a cataract operation, and a cornea transplant to replace the scarred cornea. Well, I suppose such would be wisest to do when the kid would get about 20 and quit growing, so that the lens replacement wouldn't have to be done more than once.

So then when I got about 30 or 40 they could have fixed it with removing the lens and a cornea transplant, but they hadn't got the plastic replacement lenses yet, and I'd have had to wear strange glasses with one light thin lens and one thick coke-bottle lens. So finally when the eye developed a cataract and removed the lens, it wasn't worth fixing the cornea because coincidentally about age 55 the retina was "gradually fading to black" and replacing the cornea wouldn't have done any good.

The doctor thinks the retina went to hell sooner in the bad eye just because it was a damaged eye, but dunno if there's any way to know. Maybe that retina would have prematurely failed even if the lens and cornea had been fine. Difficult to know such things.

Lifestyle issues of being one-eyed, it isn't a crippling condition. Just be super-careful protecting the good eye because there ain't no backup. Wasn't good playing baseball, but maybe wouldn't have been good playing baseball anyway. Maybe I would have been a better football lineman with two eyes, or maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Kept me from getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. 1Y draft status. They would draft you if you had 2 weak eyes, but not if you were "legally blind" in one of the eyes.

I'm a terrible driver. Never have accidents, but there are parking spots I won't try to enter that an ordinary fella could get in and out of. OTOH I know some pretty good one-eyed drivers, so maybe I'd be terrible at it with 2 eyes. I'm real careful and slow and spend a lot of time moving my head around if for instance working inside a power amplifier or a breaker box. Have to look at it from several angles to make sure a tool or probe is going where I think its going. OTOH a fine electrician did some house wiring for me earlier this year, real fast and accurate in a hot breaker box and he only has one eye and it doesn't keep him from getting it done. Over 40 and hasn't electrocuted himself yet, so maybe I can't blame being doofus with wires on the eye either.

I have fairly good "engineering aptitudes" except tend to score bad on spatial intelligence type tests. Maybe growing up one-eyed affects the brain's development of spatial intelligence, or maybe not. Dunno. If being one-eyed affects development of brain skills, it might even matter which eye is blind? The right eye is wired to the left side of the brain where the "logical and verbal" skills predominate, and the left eye is wired to the right side of the brain where the "intuitive and aesthetic and emotional" skills predominate. For instance I can appreciate the visual beauty of plants, but never could tell an oak from a rose bush. Maybe being two-eyed would have been the same, or maybe I'd be better at logical visual identification if the left brain was getting a video feed? Both sides of the brain are interconnected except rare individuals, so its not like the left brain doesn't get any video at all, but the left side of the visual cortex not getting a feed, and the visual cortex does a heck of a lot of heavy-duty processing before it is passed on to other parts of the brain. Might actually make a difference. Or not. Visual cortex is a rather large area of the rear surface of the brain, with a sizeable percentage of our total computing horsepower.

All in all, one-eyed ain't a crippling thang, though. One issue is sun glare driving. Have to wear a brimmed hat driving in morning or afternoon, to keep the sun out of the eye. If the sun gets in the only eye, kinda hard to see to drive. Am told that having 2 eyes makes it less likely that the sun will get in both eyes at the same time.

Edited September 15, 2012 by Lester Weevils