Aventures chez l'orthoptiste

Oh, I have so much to catch up on. Let's start with my visit to the orthoptiste on Friday.

I spent some time in the waiting room talking with a little girl whose mom dropped her off to see the orthophoniste while she went shopping. I've already perfected the art of saying "Ah, oui?" to adults when I don't quite really understand what they're saying, and it worked even better in this case. She spoke very fast, and there was something about someone dying of a throat ailment, but her dog ("mon toutou") was fine, so maybe the one that died was also a dog. She certainly didn't seem very upset about it.

Once I went in to see the orthoptiste, the adventures continued. She did the prism thing again, putting in front of my left eye a ruler-shaped object with increasingly angled prisms on it. Then I had to look (with both eyes) at a light on the other wall, or at a ball at the top of a wand she held, as she moved the ruler from one prism to another, and I was to let her know when the one light or one ball looked like two. Actually, she could tell when it did because she could see my eyes not converging. Sometimes I had to try actively to make it one image, and sometimes I just had to "see without watching."

The idea is that my eyes should be able to make one image from two images that are at a certain angle, and I can't do it yet at the specified angle (actually different angles for near and far vision), but I improved over the session, and we'll keep meeting twice a week or so for a while. She's also going to give me exercises to do at home. And I'm sposed to look up, or move my eyes all around, to relax my eyes when they feel strained.

Once when we got to a particularly hard angle, and I was trying to make the two images into one, my eyes just suddenly went all haywire and the two images went really far apart. That was weird. Also, even when I could make the two images into one, it wasn't always in focus. She said that was normal, and explained that when we do the sequence of prisms, and the angle between the two images gets bigger, the brain likes to interpret that as an object coming closer, so your eyes automagically change their focal length!

Oh, and the thing I can do with moving my left eye while my right eye stays still... my mom had reminded me about that when she was here, so I showed the orthoptiste. She said it was fine that I could do that.... but not to do that.