Vision therapy - week 2

I forgot to mention that last week, when playing around with the Brock string with both eyes, I crossed my eyes to look at the bead. When my vision therapist saw this, she said "WHOAAAAA! You exotrope, you!" I had a similar reaction when I crossed my eyes for a different optometrist who offered vision therapy. Apparently the ability to cross my eyes is a good sign. It shows that I have some conscious control over my eye muscles. Who knew? I just thought it was a fun trick to make my face look funny.

Anyhow. Even though my homework was to use the Brock string with one eye, I still wanted to to play with it with both eyes, and trying to see the X. I found that I could easily see a Y or a V, depending on where I put the bead:

I could not see the X, though. Or the backwards V. So I tried what the vision therapist suggested, and tapped the bead with my finger. That shook the string around too, and helped quite a bit. I could now see the X (and the backwards V), but some of the strings were flashing and flickering in and out. The dotted lines represent the flickering strings:

I think they are flickering like that because each eye keeps trying to "take over" and suppress the other eye. I wish they would quit fighting like that.

Anyway... my second week of vision therapy.

Denise checked the tracking in my left eye. Still jumpy.

Then we played some "ball games", as she called them. I patched my right eye and put a strong base out prism on my left eye. I then hit a ball hanging from the ceiling back and forth with the vision therapist. Then I took the prism off my eye and hit the ball around again. It was a strange experience. I kept missing the ball, but then acclimated to the prism. Then I took off the prism and couldn't hit the ball again! I didn't quite understand the purpose of this exercise, though: something about brains and hands and eyes.

Then she brought out this device called a cheiroscope.

This is how it works. You look through the eye pieces and the image on the card appears to be on the paper. You then trace the image on the paper using a pencil. The image on the card appears to be on the paper because your eyes are fusing the two images together.

When I tried to use the cheiroscope, I saw two separate images. I saw a mirror with an image on it and, next to it, a blank piece of paper. We tried putting prisms on this eye or that eye, but nothing was working. Arrghh!

At this point, time was about up, but before I left, the vision therapist showed me one last thing. She showed me these nifty anti-suppression cards to be used with red/green glasses. You can only see all the cards if you are using both eyes. If you suppress one eye, half of the cards disappear. They either go blank or turn black.

My homework for next week:

try to make the X with the Brock string
try to use the cheiroscope
practice more eye tracking with my left eye
play more "ball games" at home
play around with the anti-suppression training cards