My Optometrist gave a talk on Memorial Day. He interviewed me and I was 1 of 2 current patients of his that he featured in the talk. In order to see the talk, you need to have a membership to an optometry website: I heart VT. Like - I love Vision Therapy. I think this is the link: https://www.iheartvt.org
[Photo: the iheart VT logo. There is a black heart to the left of the words, and the photo has a magenta offset heart above it and to the left, and a turquoise offset heart below it and to the right.]
I wonder how many of you relate to some of the things he said?
The topic was Dissociation. He was explaining how Optometrists can recognize that many of their patients probably do it. And how to help them with Vision Therapy.
There are some of the symptoms -
Tunneling. Meaning, focused so intently on what you are looking at, so that the background disappears. This can show up as a person walking and staring at the ground, unable to look up as they walk. This can also show up with horse back riders - they stare at the horses head to the frustration of horse riding trainers.
Sensitivity to light. Keeping lights off in the house. Walking around in the dark.
Issues with driving and parking. Not able to gage what speed you are going. Not able to park straight.
Being startled easily when things come in to your visual range.
Unable to focus on reading. Unable to focus on studying.
Things (like furniture, the floor, fixed objects) “move.” (Jareth has this. It was my normal; I didn’t realize I have this until vision therapy made things stop moving and then it was AMAZINGly calm.)
Perhaps existing in a “fictional world” in your head. That can feel very real.
Isolation. This one struck me big - because I see me having been doing this over the years, more and more: Isolation, over time, means "not wanting to leave the house." Closing curtains and closing yourself in. It doesn’t start when someone is younger but increases over the years. I just blocked off my windows with contac paper maybe 2 months ago. My decluttering expert unblocked windows of mine. And I have basically re-blocked them off. Remember, I am approaching 50. So if you’re in your 20s or 30s, you may not relate to this one. No worries.
The exercises they have given me - wear ankle weights during vision therapy and at home now and then (light weight: 1 pound weights) and use a weighted blanket have helped me. There was a time during Vision Therapy with my therapist, A, when she asked me "how are you doing?" And I replied: "I think I am dissociating." She got into gear and made the exercise much harder so I was forced to pay attention!
That moment was a pivotal moment for me - I need to pay attention to the HERE and NOW. Smells, sensations, my 5 senses ... these are the things I pay attention to much more now after months of vision therapy with their focus to help me not dissociate anymore! I don't think I dissociate anymore, but I will get back to you on that. This is HUGE!
By the way, people who dissociate in their childhood (as I did), have large chunks of their memory missing. I have large chunks of my memory missing. I do remember, as a child, thinking, "I need to remember my memories, or I will forget them." And I would sit there and intentionally review my memories. I wonder if other people ever did that too? Please let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments, below. Thank you!
I have been doing light therapy as part of my vision therapy. We started at once a week at the vision therapy practice, I think 3 minutes per round.
So, you may have heard of light therapy for folks who have Seasonal Affect Disorder. Some folks get sad or depressed during the winter months because there is less sunlight. My friend Katie of the Fellowship of Former Christian Scientists uses this lamp:
Some folks use lamps like that one, to combat the long winter months and feel more happy because they have more light in their life during the winter.
Light therapy, it turns out, can do more than just help a person feel more happy during the winter months!
It turns out that light therapy can treat skin issues too, and a variety of other things. I had light therapy on my exzema and some other things on my skin that I can't remember now specifically what they were. It basically bleached some red patches on my skin and worked in conjunction with a topical cream solution I use twice a day.
Light therapy, according to WebMd, can also treat migraines, acne, neck pain, dementia, strokes... all kinds of things! Wow!
My vision therapy team has loaned me a lamp with a lightbulb in it. When I first did this, I used a bright pen light to shine light through specific glasses I wear. Then, they told me to use a non-LED bulb at 25 watts at home. I set one up.
And now they have loaned me the correct lamp. It's a nice portable little lamp. I am supposed to work my way slowly up to 20 minutes per session, per pair of glasses.
The first pair of glasses is a deep indigo color. I love looking at the bulb through the relaxing indigo color. It's quite beautiful. The glasses say on them: "Upsilon-Omega." Then, I rest my eyes by palming them. Then I put on the second pair of glasses, they are a deep forest green color, and stare at the lightbulb. The green glasses say on them: "Mu-Upsilon." I am not as much a fan of the green glasses.
I have to do these specific glasses. I think the case where they store the glasses at the vision therapist office has 20-30 pairs of different types of glasses. So this two pairs are my specific "prescription." I am not entirely sure what they are doing.
The green may be making me less sensitive to bright light outside and thus have fewer migraines. I am not sure. The blue may be helping me see better out of my right eye, especially. I don't think I have written the blog post yet about how I cannot see in the dark at all. I really can't, and especially can't see out of my right eye in the dark.
I figured this out when my son was trying to show me something and it was evening. He had to hold my hand and guide me around bushes, trees and a neighbor's house to go see something. Oh wait, he actually wanted me to Smell something; not see it. I think someone had been vaping and he thought it smelled good but he didn't know what it was. When he got me back to that place, the scent was gone. I am guessing it was a vape pen that smelled like vanilla or something.
But that was the night I realized I seriously can't see in the dark as well as probably normal people can.
It's funny, because I keep the lights dim in the house all the time. I walk around in the dark or have minimal nightlights in the outlets that are movement-sensitive, so they turn on just so I can see where I'm going at night.
I think this blog post has wandered all over the place. I think I will need to do another blog post about this topic. Maybe on a day when my ADHD brain is a bit more organized!!
This Covid-19 quarantine is doing quite the number on my thinking / my thoughts. Everything is in a jumble.
I type this blog post at the end of April; I think I have been self-quarantining for almost 2 months now. I wish I had written down the date that I started. It's been a while.
I wonder if by the time this is read, if I will still be in quarantine. Probably. The date for Virginia to stop the quarantine, as far as I know, is June 10. At least it was the last time I checked.
Best wishes to all. Please leave me a comment so I know you're reading.
I went to Vision Therapy twice after I had already started self-isolating at home. At first, the Optometrist's office was able to stay open. But then practices like his, which aren't deemed (vital?) had to shut down.
I talked with them on the phone two weeks in a row after that, to discuss my treatment while I'm at home.
And now I am trying to do my treatment while I am at home. My treatment consists of so many kinds of things, and I wish I had photos or whatever of all the different things. I wish I spent more time doing these things. Alas, there is just so much going on in my life and I don't do the self-care things the way I am supposed to.
I wasn't brought up with the term "self-care," so I am just now learning what it is, and what it means. This is what self-care means to me - after years of paying attention and trying to understand it:
take your medicines at the proper times
sleep a healthy amount of sleep for you
take a nap if you need to (I can't fully sleep at night so often need to nap. I can't help it; it's part of my Complex PTSD to not be able to sleep well at night.)
eat good food, not only junk
exercise or do something active during your days (this is the skill I am the worst at)
And now, with vision therapy, I have new Self-Care items to add to the list.
Here is one of them: it's called the Moro Reflex.
This woman explains what the Moro Reflex is so well, and shows an advanced exercise.
The first movement he does is similar to what I am doing. This is another Moro Reflex exercise:
Several months ago, early in my vision therapy, my therapist actually had me doing these: Carpet Angels. (Like snow angels, but on the carpet.) So this is a more basic exercise, a baby step up to more complex Moro Splat reflexes.
Here is another video with different information about the Carpet Angels:
So, this is one thing I am supposed to be doing every day, 20 times per day in my self-isolation version of Vision Therapy.
I need to be better about doing these things. There is just so much going on in my life that everything else always seems like the priority.
Also, after doing meals and dishes, I have to give my heart a rest because it races so often and just needs to calm down for a while before I start the next thing. This happens to me constantly. I wouldn't wish a heart problem on anyone.
I finally understand that saying: "Youth is wasted on the young." I used to love things like rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, camping, water skiing, snow skiing, ice skating. And now my heart gets all excited at loading the dish washer. Yep, my life is just THAT exciting. My body isn't what it once was, thanks to heart issues.
Anyway, I hope this blog post helps many people out there. It works well for folks who are on the Autism Spectrum as well as folks who have been traumatized as children or as adults and have a big startle reflex. One of the videos says that it helps folks like me who have bad short-term memory. I can't often interpret what I am looking at, since I see it in ways that other folks don't have to worry about seeing it. I see it from my left eye, my right eye, and then both together but the object is transposed on top of itself in an odd way. My brain then has to interpret what those 3 different things I just saw were. It's complex, and it means I can't retain a lot of things long term in my head.
So, this Moro Splat exercise is supposed to help me with having better short term memory, too.
Well, I have an unusual blog post for now. I have been self-quarantining for I think about 6+ weeks now. I started before President Trump was taking it seriously. No, that's not a dig at the President. It's just a fact. I took it seriously based on the advice of a friend of mine.
This is a shout out to my friend and a few of his links:
My friend is Shane Odom of Miscellaneous Oddiments. He and his wife make bubble wands for the Maryland Renaissance Festival. They also make leather masks and use the scraps from the eye holes of the masks to make delightful leaf-shaped earrings of all kinds. They also make Yule season ornaments. And Shane cuts out the most intricate snowflakes I have ever seen, with themes taken from Mother Nature.
Shane posted something early on in the Covid-19 theme talking about how folks will need to self-isolate and how he had already begun to self-isolate. I immediately started wearing gloves and started using my hand sanitizer. I rarely used hand sanitizer, and now I was using it regularly.
Anyway, soon I learned about needing masks, and I began to try to find a pattern that my boys and I could sew together. I homeschool my boys, so I figured a class or 5 about sewing was in the works. It took way too long for me to find a pattern, but we did, eventually.
My older son cuts out the cloth and batting. He and I shared the work of sewing. My younger son hasn't yet seemed interested in the project. But we will get there eventually. I wish I had some buttons, I would teach them both how to sew a button. Before they leave my home, I want them to learn some basic sewing skills. One thing I pride myself on is making that back or inside as beautiful as the outside. I believe this is something I may have read in the book series, "Little House on the Prairie," but Laura Ingalls Wilder. Or, I may have read it in "Gone with the Wind," by Margaret Mitchell.
I believe Steve Jobs must have had this same ethic, because I hear the inside of the Apple products are just as beautiful as the outside is.
Apparently, I love to digress. I hope you will forgive me. My ADHD runs away with my thoughts sometimes, and I have to reel in my train of thought.
Well, that cute movie and its "Train of Thought" got me distracted completely and now I can't remember what I was typing about.
Oh yes, Covid-19 and masks.
So, I guess what I want to say is: I hope you're self isolating. I hope if you're out and about that you are wearing a mask. The best masks are a layer of cotton with a layer of flannel. One layer of loosely-woven cotton won't do a thing. Please do more than that. Ask a friend to make you a mask, or order from this person (she is the friend of a friend) --
I had a routine of how I did things when I was still going out and about before I chose to self-quarantine completely. Here is my pattern. I am sure you have yours. But just in case this might help someone, here is what I have been doing:
My gloves are all assigned certain tasks. I was walking 3 different dogs, so I had 3 different pairs of gloves. Each set of gloves was assigned only to that one dog. And, yes, I washed them. I also hand-sanitized them. But I will get to that part.
I also had one more pair for when I went grocery shopping. Only for grocery shopping and nothing else.
So, I would get out of my car, open the back to my car to reveal my various sets of gloves all laid out. Then with my bare hands, I would reach to my door knob inside the car and hit the lock-button to lock the car. Then I would get out my mask, sitting on the dashboard of my car. I would put on my mask, and shut the car door with probably my elbow or my hip.
Then, I would walk to the back of the car, select the appropriate pair of gloves, and put them on.
When I got back to the car, I would slide off just one glove and open the hatch back. (So as not to contaminate the back hatch of my car with my gloved hand and whatever it picked up.)
Open the back hatch, use the hand sanitizer on them, and put them in their proper place in the lineup of gloves.
Opening that back hatch would unlock my car. So now I could, with no gloves on my hand, open my car door, take off my mask, put it on the dashboard, and sanitize my hands again. Then I would shut the door.
It was a whole routine. I haven't had to do this in weeks, so I may have missed a step in there. But believe me, I had thought it out and was being as careful as possible.
I am considered to be in the "High Risk" category because of my heart problems. I asked my doctor about this. My doctor first said that basically everyone is considered "high risk" now, but yes, my heart problems especially put me in that category. This is one of the reasons why I took it so seriously, wore gloves, had a habit of how to do this, and self-isolated quickly.
The last time I went out to walk the dogs was the first day I wore the mask. My heart started beating rapidly for no reason. I was just walking around the home of someone whose dog I walk. I got the dog's water dish and was washing it in her sink. My heart started beating rapidly and I couldn't breathe. The mask impeded my breathing even further and I felt like I was about to suffocate.
I had to take my mask off in her house and do my best to leash up her dog so I could get us outside so I could pant and try to breathe and calm down my heart.
The whole experience was very scary for me, and I have been home ever since that dog walk. I am not sure what to do when I need to go out and about again and still wear a mask. I don't know if the proper N95 masks are more easy to breathe with. I wonder if any of them will be available by the time it becomes necessary for me to be out in public again?
So, I wrote this post to let you know that I, too, and self-quarantined. I am isolated. I am watching Netflix and movies. I am learning to be creative and cook from the pantry. My dog and I are taking things easy, and so are the boys. We are just trying to get through these difficult days and doing our best, the best we can, during this time.
I hope you all are doing what you can do to get through this extraordinary time, too.
I will leave you with this photo that I'm not particularly a fan of, but it's of me wearing the mask I sewed. My son picked out the beautiful fabric for my mask. An odd thing happens when you take a selfie and you're wearing a mask - you realize it doesn't matter if you smile or not.
I have vision issues and the sun was most definitely in my eyes when I took this shot. I wasn't smiling. I was squinting at the camera to make sure it was aimed correctly. Haha.
[A photo of me walking a rail at Vision Therapy. The rail is a long plank of wood that has been painted a very light blue. I am a blonde gal wearing funky prisms glasses with a bright orange band around my head, and I am also wearing a dress with blue roses, and fuzzy socks. Behind me is a platform for people to sit on and swing as another aspect of vision therapy.] Me, in my favorite dress, using the walk rail at Vision Therapy
One of the first things we did with vision therapy was teach me how to use a walk rail. I had no idea I had challenges walking. I mean, I do know that when I was a kid, every day I walked in to walls and furniture.
I remember being a teenager, and waking up and walking right in to my dresser, then walking into the wall that jutted out in front of my room in the hallway. (It was the wall on the outside of my brother's closet, in the room next to mine; but for me to walk down the hallway, I needed to walk around this corner.) I walked into that wall every single day.
So, one morning, I happened to pay attention to my body. (It wasn't something I did very often; see posts on dissasociation - I will probably post on it many times over the course of this blog.)
I woke up, and got out of bed to walk to the bathroom. I walked straight into my dresser, maneuvered myself around it, and walked straight into the wall outside my room instead of walking around either obstruction.
I decided I was done walking into these things. I couldn't probably help myself completely and stop walking into everything, but I could at least stop myself from walking into my dresser and this wall.
I knew blind people would count their steps and have their entire house memorized so they wouldn't have to walk into their furniture. Surely I could figure out a way to stop walking into things in my own home. I decided right then and there to approach them more slowly and take my time and walk around them.
I never walked into that dresser or that wall again. Don't get me wrong, I still walk into things. A lot. I have bruises up and down my legs. I don't even notice that I walk into things. I will see a bruise sometimes and wonder what I walked into. I often walk into the dishwasher door and the coffee table. And who knows what else.
I would figure when the vision therapist told me I had trouble walking, that THIS was what they were referring to.
The way this vision therapist seems to work is they start me on activities, but won't necessarily say what it is or why we are doing something. I know it would help me, personally, if I knew why we were doing something. But I guess their methodology is that they want me to improve organically. Improve by doing things, rather than telling me what they are trying to improve.
It reminds me of the early scene in the movie, "The Karate Kid," where the student is learning "Wax on, wax off." He doesn't know he is learning Karate right then - he just thinks he is waxing a car. Maybe my vision therapist is like my Vision Master - she is showing my body how to do things. And then, it will naturally improve in doing things when I am going about my business during days, outside of the vision therapy room.
I will be talking about the vision rail many times in these blog posts. Recently, when I was walking it, my vision therapist told me how she saw improvement, and THEN, I understood why she hadn't told me what she was going for. I will share all of that, too.
My vision rail looks like a floor level balance beam. And: I don't walk ON it. I walk next to it in certain, specific ways.
