amblyopia

[ERObjd]

Anyone else have this eye disorder?

I had cross eye as a kid ,and had to wear an eye patch on my left eye from about age 3 to age 5. vision never got better in left eye always blurry. Had operation at age 5 which corrected cross eye and put both eyes in unison..but vision was still legally blind in left eye about 20/400.

Depth perception is not good but you learn to adapt.I never had binocular vison but it never stopped me from sports, shooting, driving, parachuting , you just use different cues to compensate.
It is not correctable with glasses and no cure for it. I did have acousin about my age who had cross eyes as well but eye patching worked for him and he was able to get normal vision back though he still had operation to correct the cross eye. I guess patching works for some and not for others.
I was surprised at the # of actors who have amblyopia or strambisus and only see out of 1 eye..Paris Hilton, Heidi Kulm, Denzel Washington, Forest whittiker and there is even a former Jets receiver Wesley Walker who had this disorder as well. U of Nebraska had a linebacker a few year back who only had vision in one eye.. anyway just wondering if any one else has it. I knew a guy who lost vision in his eye after a shop accident and he had a pretty good learning curve because he was used to having binocular vision and at first e struggle with tasks like driving parking walking down stairs ect. It took some time to adapt with vison in one eye. I never had that issue because I have never had binocular vision..no need to go to a 3d movie since i dont see in 3d.I also do not hear in stereo i hear in mostly mono.

 

[wompo]

Yes. I have same exact experience with cross eyes when young. Eye patch followed by surgery. I am now dominate in left eye and depth perception is not good but has never been a problem with sports or anything.

 

[Aerides]

My sister has this as a result from an accident. She was bartending in college, dropped a bottle, and a glass shard flew into her left eye. Surgery and recovery were enough to put her off the idea of ever pursuing a cornea transplant which would be needed to restore any real vision in that eye, so she has depth perception issues.

Still, as I like to remind her, she was always a terrible driver, and quite clumsy before that, so not that much difference. She doesn't make right hand turns into traffic unless there's literally no cars coming as depth perception is basically zero.

She has a corrective contact lens that gets her to about 20/80 in that eye, enough to cure the stray-eyeball thing and basically see shapes and colors, but she doesn't wear it often. Only really for events and if she's expecting to have photos taken.

 

[Sue J]

My 37 year old son was born with "trace cataracts" in both eyes. At around age 2 my husband noticed his eyes not tracking correctly when moving from near to far and we took him to a pediatric ophthalmologist.

The doctor explained that my sons brain was trying to get around the reduced vision by concentrating on one eye and the other eye became "lazy", causing amblyopia. My son was using just one eye and when the doctor covered his good eye in the office my son was walking into walls. That's how bad his bad eye was!

We did patches until he got glasses and then we had an occluder to clip on his glasses to cover his good eye and exercise the bad eye. We did this therapy for about 4 hours a day and then later reducing the time as the doctor saw improvement.

As an adult he is nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other eye. The formerly "bad" eye cannot be fully corrected with lenses. He says that it's not as sharp as his other eye and also a little dimmer. He has a hard time with binoculars and uses just his good eye for things like a telescope.

His pediatric ophthalmologist told us early on that as a child he should not have these removed and replaced. But I would expect that as he gets older/elderly he may have issues like his Dad and I are having with cataracts as he ages.

This hasn't kept him from doing anything, but I suspect it would prevent him from being a pilot or would keep him out of the military. Not an issue with his career in IT.

 

[ivinsfan]

Our youngest had this issue. severely inward turning on one eye. It actually took two surgeries before age 2 to correct it.
Our little town of 10K oddly had an eye surgeon that was world class at this stuff.


When DD gets an eye exam they can't believe it because her vision ie depth perception and tracking are right on the money.



This was 40 years ago with some lame insurance that only paid around 500 bucks toward the costs, but the whole in hospital procedure only cost around 1100 bucks!!

 

[GTFan]

Yep I've had it since birth, had to wear a patch too. Eyes were never corrected to be in sync so I never used my left eye even though it had 20/20 vision until this year. Had what they call an 'eye stroke' event (NAION) late last year in that eye, diagnosed as a narrow opening for the optic nerve into the retina that was somehow affected by a blood flow event.

Fortunately since I don't use the eye all I have now is blurriness there at times which I can ignore.

I am not sure about this but think that use of forceps in that time (I was a big baby from a small mom) may have had something to do with it.