Wichita Optometrist Part 2

The author of the blog sits behind the wheels of optometry used for diagnosing glasses prescriptions 

Having had such a weird experience with my new optometrist (“Mr. How Do You Like Living in Heaven”), I was resolved not to go back next year, and find a new optometrist. 

I was also weirded out that even though he is thought to be a premier guy of vision therapy, he never said I would benefit from it. He didn’t do 90% of the tests that Dr Tod Davis did to me (which were exhausting, honestly, but they found my extensive problems!)

This guy didn’t even show me the standard book test of a raised butterfly when wearing 3D glasses. “Is the butterfly flat on the page, or above it?” I’ve seen that test since I was in Kindergarten, and even Dr. Davis and other doctors have shown me that test throughout the years!

I asked him if he ever went on the I❤️VT site. (I heart vision therapy.) and he’d never heard of it. That was bewildering to me, too. 

I told him about my blog here, and he said he would check it out. I wonder if he will learn a great deal about vision therapy, more than he knew before, thanks to my site here? That would be interesting. 

So, I had resolved that with the whole, “How do you like living in heaven?,” the lack of referral to vision therapy, the lack of testing beyond “which one is better, A or B?” And the not knowing about the I❤️VT site (that I have blogged about before, my story was in a talk given by Dr. Tod Davis on that site for Memorial Day one year, a few years ago, I resolved not to go back to this optometrist.

One thing he did say that also stuck in my head, in a good way this time, I suppose was: “I’m surprised you don’t wear your glasses very often.” I had thought it was important not to wear them often, since glasses are often over-prescribed and make our eyes weaker and weaker. It’s a real issue. So I feel I have protected my eyes from getting worse and worse, by not wearing them very often. My prescription really hasn’t changed that much since high school in the late 1980s. 

I asked him why it was odd to him that I didn’t wear them much. He said, “because you’re not getting the benefit of the prisms in your lenses.” That hadn’t occurred to me.

Before he would give me my prescription, he tested me about the prisms. He asked me to look at a chart with letters on the wall without the prisms, and then put the prism on my glasses and asked me to tell him if anything was different. 

Without the prisms, my eyes circled around the letters, until they could interpret what it was on the wall and what I wanted to focus on. With the prisms, my eyes went directly to the middle of the chart without circling around it.

He then said that the prisms DO help me. And I felt like maybe I was encouraged to wear them more. I made a mental note to process this and see if I wanted to change my behavior around wearing eye glasses. 

About 2 weeks after my appointment, my new eyeglasses arrived. I went in to try them on and get them fitted. They are nice! I opted for the least expensive option they offered me, which was still fairly pricey (another not to Dr. Davis whose practice offers less costly eyeglasses, because they know vision therapy is a priority and already expensive enough.) I was reminded later that I could have just taken my prescription and gone to a cheaper place to buy the eyeglasses, like online. But I haven’t figured out how to order the eyeglasses with my prism prescription, so I don’t actually feel like I have the option to order from something like 1800Contacts.com or zenni.com or WarbyParker.com etc. 

Anyway, I put on the new glasses and they were a better prescription for me than my previous pair! I was flabbergasted! I took them off and tried on my previous pair, and the difference was quite noticeable. 

My new glasses feel better for my eyes, and I am wearing them a lot more!

I can read with them on, as opposed to constantly having to take them off to read. And I am enjoying looking around my world more, now, with the new eye glasses. 

So maybe despite the fact that this optometrist is a bit odd and Christian-centered in a medical world (so weird & off-putting), maybe I will continue to go to him, because he knows how to prescribe eyeglasses that work for my eyes better than my previous prescription (which was nearly 3 years old at that point.) 

Wichita Optometry

 I have started going to a new optometrist in Wichita, KS (because that’s where I live now). 

I miss Dr. Tod Davis. He has such a fun and delightful demeanor, cracking jokes, loving his job, loving his patients, and sometimes making quips in spontaneous German. 

I showed up at the new practice in Wichita in December during the Christmas season. I wasn’t surprised by the Christmas tree in the lobby. It was nice to see a video of the practice, with the doctors talking about their specialities. 

Having said that, I was quite overwhelmed by all the noise in the lobby. 

The front desk person was of course checking people in, having them fill out paperwork, wait to be seated, making short business phone calls to remind patients of their upcoming appointments, having brief comments with doctors who came out of their offices periodically…. Normal things for a front desk person to be doing. No problem. 

The TV to my left was on, as I said, with the short videos about vision issues and the various doctors of the practice talking about their specialty. Every now and then, there was a screen with the company motivation shown - it talked about being Christian and how their faith has motivated them to be a vision practice. I don’t really understand the correlation, and it was jarring to see this. 

My vision issues couldn’t read the whole thing quickly enough before it went off the screen. I don’t know how long the loop was, but I didn’t want to sit there and stare for like 15-20-30-40 minutes until it came back on and then wait to have it loop around again. I did see it a couple of times, but my ADHD time blindness has no concept of how long I sat there or how long the video loop was. It was jarring, and I wasn’t motivated to read it and I didn’t get out my camera to snap a photo, either. 

Also, in the same lobby, were religious carols (Silent Night, Holy Night, What Child is This? Etc.) being piped into the room on the other side of me. And, to my far right was the place where patients try on various kinds of glasses until they find one they like, then the person helping them writes the order. 

At one point, a vision therapist came out with a patient of theirs, and the patient stood there, covering one eye at a time and looking at a picture hanging on the window. She just stood there, over and over, covering one eye and then uncovering it. Over and over and over. Right next to me. It was bizarre vision therapy that I have never seen, and her vision therapist never spoke to her, just stood there, as the woman did this cover / uncover / cover / uncover and look at the picture hanging on the window. Erm, okay.

It was a LOT going on for such a small space to sit in. 

After a while, I was called back to meet my new optometrist. He looked at my chart and said, “how do you like heaven?” I am not sure how I replied. He asked me again a while later, because he knew I had moved from Virginia to Kansas. “How do you like living in heaven?” 

At the time, I wasn’t particularly liking Kansas. I was really struggling with depression, anxiety, loneliness, isolation, and a boring gray landscape with no color. Still, the eye doctor persisted, “How do you like living in heaven?” 

About 4 times of this, it finally dawned on me that he meant Kansas in general. 

I asked him, “when you say ‘Heaven,’ do you mean ‘Kansas?’” And he basically said “yes,” without even looking up from his work figuring out my chart and my eyeglasses. 

I told him that I was struggling to like it. I tried to make it sound nice, though - “I just moved from Shenandoah, Virginia, and this is a big change.” I didn’t really feel like telling him how isolated and depressed I was, and how I never left my house for the most part, because of my severe anxiety. 

I asked around to other Kansas people later, “is Kansas typically referred to as ‘Heaven?’” No one had heard that before, and everyone thought it was weird that this doctor asked me this not once (which is weird), but at least 4 times. Bizarre.

I felt bewildered by a lot of the experience there. Also, some of it was helpful.

I told this doctor (as I have told so many eye doctors over the years), that my eyes hurt a lot of the time. I have constant, chronic eye pain. 

At some point, he asked me to hold my eyes open while he peered at them with a bright light. I could hardly comply. I had to blink. 

The doctor then announced to me that I probably have dry eye. He said this is what causes the pain. I asked him how he knew. He said because I had said that my eyes hurt all the time, and that when I was asked not to blink, it was hard for me and I had to blink. 

So he referred me to another doctor in the practice who specializes in Dry Eye. 

I will post about that visit in a future blog post. 

Kindle Vella: Fairy Tech

I discovered that I have a love of fairies in about 1999. I dreamt up a whole story about 2 fairies in particular, Sprout and Violet, and wrote about 7 chapters of a book about them, “Fairy Tech.” 

Around that same time, I got married, became a mom and got severely overwhelmed with life for the next 20 years. 

I have no idea where those 7 chapters have gone. I wish I knew. They were pretty darn good. My great-aunt (who is no longer with us) said, “it’s very imaginative.” I decided to take that as a compliment. 

Well, I have since divorced and become an empty-nester. I checked in with myself about this story, and decided to try to write it. I haven’t seen this story written by anyone else, so I still believe it is a unique story. 

Because it’s partly about technology, I have had to modify the story a bit to make it more current. Technology has changed a lot since the year 2000! 

As is common with writers, though, we believe in a story, we start writing it, we get partly in, review our work and think, “this is terrible!” Well, I have gone through the “this is terrible!” Stage with this story now, and am hoping to get back writing on it very soon. 

The current first 2 chapters, such as they are, are available on Kindle Vella here: 

https://smile.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BKVQRKWW

Kindle Vella is a whole new way for authors to share stories. The first 3 chapters on Kindle Vella are free for the reader to read. 

I have decided that the first 5 chapters of my book, “Fairy Tech” will be available for folks who subscribe to my SubStack newsletter! 

You can sign up for my newsletter here: https://jodicrump.substack.com/

I wrote another book !

I wrote it during the month of September. I published it on Amazon and Amazon Kindle last week, in time for October / Halloween season. I just hired a narrator to read it for Audible.com and iTunes! Very exciting!

My book is called:  Simple Book of Shadows: Basic Secular Witchcraft for Witches

I designed the cover, wrote the blurbs and wrote the book. I also took all the photos inside the book. If you have any witchy friends, or people in your life who love to talk about the moon and Mercury retrogrades or crystals or even people in your life who blow out candles on their birthday, will you please tell them about my book? Better yet, buy them a copy for a surprise Halloween gift! I would sincerely appreciate it. 

You can purchase my book on Amazon dot com, or read it on Amazon’s Kindle. 

You can see my Author page on Amazon dot com here: https://www.amazon.com/Jodi-Rose-Crump/e/B07H1MMVFN/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1

If you read and like my book, send me a note on Facebook or Instagram or if you have my email, send me an email … Thank you for reading my book! I can’t wait to hear from you! 

Mere Creativity: And Also Some Circus Skills

Did you know I am an author? My published book is called “Mere Creativity: And also some circus skills.” 

You can get a copy on Amazon and on Amazon Kindle, or even read for free on Kindle Library. 

You can purchase the book here. 

If you go to that site and click on the cover of my book, the first few pages of the book will show up & you can read those, free!

Please sign up for my new email list.

I have a new book coming out, and I am planning to write a lot more books on many different topics. Sign up to learn about my newest books, when they come out! I promise not to pester you every single day. 

Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack!

https://jodicrump.substack.com/ 

Vision Therapy

Three years ago, I went to my first Vision Therapy appointment with “Dr. Magic” AKA Tod Davis of Virginia Vision Therapy. 

Well, actually, he is the Optometrist, and several of the people working for him are the vision therapists. I worked with A. She is fantastic. I miss her.

She was so kind and patient with me. I was going through some of the worst, hardest things in my life at that point. I often showed up, crying and crying and feeling unsafe. 

She would sit me down in a chair and help me ground myself under a weighted blanket. And be so gentle, listening to me cry and maybe talk, maybe be unable to talk. And I would gradually realize I was safe with her. I am so grateful for professionals who make a safe place for the people they are working with. 

The weighted blanket draped over my shoulders would help weigh me down so that I couldn’t dissociate. She would also strap 1 lb weights on my ankles, also to weigh me down. 

My memory says she was working on my propreoception - helping me know where I am in space. I wasn’t floating up by the ceiling, I wasn’t existing somewhere in the past. She was helping me realize I was right there - seated in a chair at the Vision Therapy office. 

I am so grateful to Dr. Tod Davis for diagnosing my eyes correctly. I had gone to eye doctors for about 40 years by the time I found him. I had told numerous eye doctors, “my eyes don’t work together.” They just dismissed it. And gave me eye glasses the same way every other eye doctor does. 

Dr. Davis tested me to see if I could see in 3D, and determined that I couldn’t. He also diagnosed me with lack of convergence, double-vision and many other things. He pointed out that reading is difficult for me. I didn’t know that - because I had, for 40 years, done tricks to make reading a bit easier for me - covering up words, closing 1 eye, squinting with my other eye… 

Now I know - I have trouble reading. 

Anyway, 3 years ago is when I started this vision therapy journey and I am so grateful to have come quite a ways with my own vision. 

I spent money sending my son to vision therapy. He wasn’t really ever able to articulate what he did in vision therapy to me. He has trouble articulating day-to-day things. I had hoped to blog more about his journey, but I wasn’t able to learn from him what they worked on very much. 

His journey is now over with them. Being younger, they were able to find a lot more success with molding his brain to learn new ways to use his eyes than they were able to with me. 

I had been hoping, once he was done going, that I would be able to resume going for me. I can’t afford it. 

I have stopped practicing the at-home things like the bead on a string that helps me look at something close to my eyes (like a bead) and work on the muscle that crosses our eyes. It’s a great eye muscle exercise. 

I feel like my ADHD gets in the way of me doing *anything* every single day. Story of my life - I am not consistent. Thank you, ADHD. 

I am also grateful to my ADHD, by the way, because it enables me to have moments when I can hyper-focus and do things like write a whole book in a relatively short period of time. 

Speaking of which, I am writing a whole new book. It’s on a topic that a lot of people may not feel comfortable reading, but if they actually sit down and read my book, they will walk away realizing it’s not actually the uncomfortable topic they have been taught it was, their whole life. 

Thank you for reading my blog. 

By the way, I have never asked my blog readers to buy stuff from me. I did start this blog hoping I could monetize it at some point. I have done everything I can to monetize this blog, and it won’t. I write and write and get discouraged, and write more later. 

The way you can help me is by Leaving a Comment. 

Seriously. Leaving a Comment on my blog posts would seriously help me towards my goal of monetizing my blog. 

I approached an eyeglasses maker about them paying me if I would write about their eyeglasses and they basically told me “no.” If, however, I had comments on this blog, showing I actually have readers who engage with my blog, that would help me in the future when I approach other companies about paying me to blog. 

Thank you for considering this & leaving a comment.