What do you see?

I remember when I was pregnant with Chad, my eye-sight had started diminishing, so I thought. We had gone bowling with some friends, and I had made a comment about how small the numbers were above the lanes, the best thing I could do was count them. My friend started laughing, thinking I was joking, which of course I wasn't. That prompted me to go to the eye doctor. Yes, the diagnosis was a astigmatism that I had, had all my life. I didn't pay attention to how tired my eyes were at the end of the day, how close I would hold a book when I read, or completely slanted my paper as I wrote because unconsciously I had made accommodations for my lack of eye sight. It was so bad, that I never noticed that I could not read the street signs until I was close to them. I remember the first time I put my glasses on, I saw the world completely different, and was amazed with all the unobserved details that I had missed.

When my child's teacher discussed her concerns with me, I panicked and did not know what to do. There are not many resources or places one can go for a diagnosis of Dyslexia. I found an eye doctor in Louisiana who specialized with visual perception problems and gave my child a lengthy diagnosis. In essence, our eyes are muscles that work together when visually processing text/information and sometimes our muscles are weak, thus do not work together. He claimed that his eyes would jump or react in a certain way to text, consequently interfering with his visual process. The images in front of him might be perceived as blurred or he would miss it completely. Best of all, this is corrected with eye therapy. The doctor gave me exercises that we would do after school, and then spent one summer traveling back and forth to receive therapy there.

The first time we did the therapy at home, I put on his colored glasses, and placed the color overlay on top. I could not see a thing, everything was blurry. As I was trying to go through the exercises, my child was laughing hysterically because he saw everything just fine when he used them. Of course, when I took the glasses off, I had done everything all wrong.

Imagine how hard it is to read text when something is interfering with the process. Sometimes, we may not even know that we see the world differently, but just make accommodations to adjust to it.