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It takes me out of my head. I’m getting double vision.

I have had a few people ask me what the name of my blog means.

It’s not an homage to a Foreigner song. It’s not cute, or ironic, or thought-provoking. It’s as literal a name as they come, folks, for it references my primary method of sight.

I have spent the greater part of my life trying to live with and come to terms with my own double vision.

I was born with congential strabismus with exotropia and hypertropia in both eyes. I also have a congenital fourth nerve palsy and eye muscles that are about a third of normal size. Imagine walking around with a leg that is a third as long as it should be, and you sort of get it.

In layman’s terms, my eyes are lazy. I just can’t get those bitches to lift a finger.

They shift up and out, and I can’t always control them. I have double vision to an extreme extent sometimes. What’s it like? Take your hands and put them side by side with about an inch in between, and slowly move them so they are diagonal from each other but are still an inch apart. That’s the way things often look to me while watching TV, while reading a book or doing work, and when driving at night. My eyes don’t work in concert with each other, and I actually have to force my left eye to work, because the nerves that control don’t work correctly.

My earliest memories are of the eye doctor. I remember going to see a doctor in a big building, which turned out to be the Wills Eye Hospital in Philly. I remember he had me look at a yellow plastic transformer as he moved it around in a circle in front of me, and I remember that I had one of those elastic ponytail holders with pink plastic balls on the ends in my hair. Random. I also r emember that the doctors did not believe I could read at the age of three and a half…it seems now a strange irony to me that I could read at such a young age, but couldn’t actually see the words properly.

For the vast majority of kids, a lazy eye is fixed with patches or exercises or prism in the lenses, but my case was pretty severe, and none of those things worked. It was off to surgery!

I had my first operation when I was four, and I don’t recall a whole lot – just that I had green foam slippers, got to take a tour of the hospital, and my parents gave me a Care Bear as a get-well gift. I don’t remember the recovery, or pain, or bandages. I do remember that Care Bear. He was green and I loved him.

Things were great for a long time. In fact, about ten years went by without incident. Sure, I had to get glasses in second grade, I had to sit in the front of the class, and sometimes I got headaches, but it appeared that the surgery worked.

Then, I hit fourteen. Freshman year. I started having headaches all the time, I couldn’t read the board, and I saw two of everything. It was so bad that I actually got nauseated from it; I was seasick without ever getting on a boat, which is quite a feat.

Back to the doctor I went, this time to a new doctor, since my old surgeon had moved on to a different area of practice. The new doc started the battery of tests that I have now come to be able to replicate in my sleep. Are these lights moving? How many do you see? What colors are they? Can you see the wings of this fly popping out at you? How about those letters, how many of them are there? I failed just about every test, and we tried prisms in my glasses for a while, but that was a temporary solution. My parents and I were informed that the only way to fix my problem was with an operation, because it was a really severe case. I got sliced up in December.

For those of you who are not familiar with this sort of surgery, it doesn’t involve lasers. It involves using a scalpel to make an incision on your cornea. Then the muscles attached to your eye are repositioned and sutured into place. Then, your eye is sewn up with disposable stitches. You actually get to go home the same day, and it’s not as bad as it sounds. But it’s still not a walk in the park, especially when you have both eyes done and can’t really see clearly for a month afterwards.

I also had to have something done called an adjustable suture, which means that the doctor takes you back in the office after surgery, makes some measurements while you are awake and your eyes are focused, and then adjusts the muscle position using the sutures on your eye. The trick is that you have to stay perfectly still while the nurse holds your eye open and the doctor fiddles around with surgical implements. You haven’t seen anything until you have seen a scalpel coming at your eye – thankfully, you can’t really feel anything. I remember the first time that I had it done that my mom actually came in the room with me, and she said that my feet were shaking so hard that my shoe came half off. Thankfully, I have an amazing eye surgeon, and he made this procedure as easy as possible.

That was also the year my parents got me tickets to two Duke games and airline tickets to Durham for Christmas, which was the greatest Christmas present ever…and I remember that only three weeks after the operatation, I couldn’t clearly see the fans across the court, but I sure as heck could make out the players. And there was only one of each of them. It was great.

Then, months of orthoptic therapy, which is basically physcial therapy for the eyes. It made my muscles stronger, but I had to have another operation to refine things during my sophomore year, which caused me to miss a bunch of school, which caused me to do poorly in Algebra 2, which caused me to have my Algebra teacher come to my house all that summer to catch me up. I was more mortified about that than I was anything else.

The good news was that those operations, combined with the eye therapy, made a huge difference, and the rest of high school was a piece of cake. While things were not perfect, my headaches were minimal, the double vision was controllable, and I was much happier. I got contacts! I was even able to pass my driving test, vision screening and all, on the day before my 18th birthday. I kicked ass on my AP tests and made it through Calculus, and set off to college with the best vision I had ever experienced, and Dr. Eye Surgeon was my hero.

Remember the irony of me being able to read before I could see correctly? Well, the girl who had vision problems galore also loved reading books of all kinds, and I became an English major in college. Nice work, huh? Probably not the best decision, but what else could I do? What major can you choose in college that doesn’t involve a ton of reading and computer work? I can’t paint worth a shit, after all. I got through without any major issues until October of my senior year.

While student teaching, I started to notice headaches and double vision, and I attributed it to the fact that I was dealing with a huge workload and a ton of extracirricular stuff that was wearing me out. I got a teaching contract for the next year while I was teaching. I got engaged. It was insane. I figured that things would calm down the next semester, but I had to take 19 credits to graduate due to student teaching taking a whole semester, and things didn’t calm down. They in fact got worse, and I think deep down inside, I had known all along that something was not right and I just didn’t want to admit it or deal with it.

It was back to the doc, and it was quickly determined that I had to have another operation to readjust. It was more like maintenance this time instead of reconstructive surgery, so it would not take as long to recover from…but if I wanted to graduate on time, it had to wait till afterI graduated. I got put on “handicapped status” so I could have extra-large tests made and so I could have extra time to get things completed.

It was really, really hard. It took every ounce of effort I had to get through that semester, and a lot of people who I considered friends either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the reason I was not going out every night with them was because I was either trying to get work done or was in a dark room with a pillow over my eyes trying to deal with headaches so bad that they made me cry and throw up. The reason I spent so much time with my fiancee was due in large part to the fact that he was reading things to me or for me, or typing things for me. But the problem wasn’t anything anyone could physically see (nice pun there), so a lot of people, professors included, thought I was making it up. It really made me realize that the only people I could count on were my family and fiancee, and without them, I have no idea what would have happened.

The other person I could count on was my eye doctor. I graduated in early May, and a week later, I was home in PA, having what to me was a minor adjustment. It went well, and I went off to my new life and new job with the best vision ever.

I got married, got a dog, liked my first job ok. Things were great for a while…then headaches, double vision, etc. Back to the doc. I found out that because my eye muscles were so small and so deformed, it was really hard to hold them in place at the exact point, so I had to go back under the knife to get them adjusted again. My doc was pretty straightforward with me. I needed to seriously consider what effect my job was having on my eyes. I had a 150-student class load. They all wrote papers. I had to read them all. It was really not the best choice. So afterI had surgery, I quit my teaching job and started another job in the education field that involves much less eyestrain and stress. My family, as always, was the best support system, and I got through it.

This most recent surgery was two years ago. It made me into the bionic eye woman, because they had to use permanent stitches to hold my teensy muscles in place rather than disposable ones. Every so often, some of the stitch will come through my cornea and scar tissue will cover it, and it has to be trimmed. Last time, I did it with only local anthestisia, and it really wasn’t so bad. You get mad sympathy from people when you have a bandage on your eye, too. Free dessert.

I switched surgeons to be a bit closer to where I live, and though my PA doc will always be my homeslice, the folks at Duke Eye Hospital are pretty top notch. The funniest part is that my problem is primarily a pediatric one, because the vast number of people with this problem are children, and most of them are cured of it quickly and without surgery at a young age. Not me. I will have this until I am old and grey. So I get to sit in waiting rooms with legos and toys and Highlights Magazine and cute little kids with thick glasses. Those cute little kids almost always have nervous parents who take one look at my closer-to-30-than-20-year-old self and a look of terror crosses their face momentarily. I want to tell them that chances are good that their little munchkin will not be sitting in the same waiting room in 20 years, that I am a rare occurence.

So how are my eyes currently? They are OK. Not great, not bad. I think they are starting to take another slide, but it’s not a bad one. The end result for me is when I compare what I have now to what I had my first year of high school, and the results are nothing short of amazing, because I literally could not see anything, and now I can see most things pretty well most of the time. That’s the best result I could ask for, because there are limits to what can be done thanks to the defects and weird stuff that I was born with.

I still have headaches and double vision, especially when I am tired. My perhiperal vision is limited and I have very poor depth perception. I walk into stuff all the time, and I can’t go to the movies or watch things in the dark very often. But I am learning to live with those things. I read less. I have a job where I can leave if I am having a rough day. My husband watches out for me. I don’t drive at night or for long periods of time. I can’t wear contacts more than once a month for a few hours at a time, but you bet your ass I rock these glasses like you wouldn’t believe. I make this shit look gooood.

And I can see. I will always be able to see. It might not be perfect, but I am not going to go blind from this. This isn’t going to kill me, or make me housebound, or make me go crazy. Sometimes I am miserable and frustrated, but it’s not all the time. It’s not always even most of the time. I look at the bright side – my sense of smell has increased tenfold, which is great when you walk into Starbucks, but kind of lousy when you live with a dog whose farts could peel the paint off the walls. (Just ask my sister, as she and my dad once took her through the car wash, and were stuck in the car with her for several minutes after she let one rip.) I also always have a pirate costume at the ready, and when I need people to shut up and go away, I just pull up my eye and show them my stitches, and they get the heck out. I have developed an insanely high threshold for pain, and I also have a strong enough stomach that I can watch things like “THE 200 pound tumor removal surgery” without blinking, well, an eye.

There are bad days, sure. But the good ones outnumber them by a vast majority. You sort of have to give it up to a higher power and try not to get upset about it every day. That’s not to say I don’t get frustrated or upset, because I do, but when you look at the larger picture of what could be wrong, it’s really rather small.

And, as my husband said once, “At least when you have double vision, you get to see two of me!”

I am convinced that everyone has their “something” that they have to handle, and my “something” could be a heck of a lot worse. I’m not brave or impressive – this is all I have ever known, so it’s not like I can look back with sadness and longing on the halcyon days when I could see perfectly. You handle what you have to, and so I handle this.

My bigass feet are actually usually more upsetting to me. My hubby sure can pick winners, can’t he? A dog who farts toxic waste and a blind-ass wife who has flipper-sized feet. We are quite a family.

You better believe I can still kick anyone’s ass at Balderdash. After all, you don’t have to see anything to be totally full of shit.

My sister and I had a conversation the other day t…

My sister and I had a conversation the other day that went something like this:

KWeb: So I found some stationery from our vacation to Monticello when I was nine.

Me: Wow.

Kweb: And I was thinking about how you have Shakespeare action figures.

Me: Yeah.

Kweb: And I thought to myself – what did mom and dad do to us when we were kids?”

Me: To make us this dorky? I don’t know. We are the nerdiest sisters ever.

Kweb: No kidding.

Me: Just wait till you see the Gregor Mendel: Give Peas a Chance t-shirt I am about to order.

Kweb: Oh my god. I like this one.

Me: Good choice.

Kweb: Do you want to play online Lingo?

Me: Sure.

Kweb: I can’t remember my login name to gsn.com..

Me: I think it is scottbaioexperience?

Kweb: No, it’s scottbaioexplosion.

Me: Of course.

While that is a transcription from memory, it’s pretty much what we talked about. And if you are interested, Kweb kicked my ass at Lingo. By at least a 500 Baio margin.