No, I was not in a fight, nor did I get hit in the eye playing floor hockey (though that has happened in the past). It all started in 1980.
I was a teaching assistant for an introductory physics lab geared towards pre meds. The student was having trouble isolating the microscopic oil drop with the University of Pennsylvania's version of Millikan's nobel-prize-winning experiment, which had determined the electron charge and showed that charge was quantized.
She moved over to make room for me to peer into the microscope. I toggled the switch back and forth to reverse the polarity of the field in search of a suitably-charge oil drop. For no good reason, I closed one eye, then another, and noticed that the reticule shifted back and forth along a diagonal as well as rotated. I asked the student to do the same, and she did not see the effect. The lab supervisor then walked in, so I had him take a look at what I thought was a faulty microscope. He also did not see the effect, so we continued with the lab and I forgot about the incident.
"...I peered out the window at our back yard and the scene jumped out at me in 3D. It was dizzying."
Almost a decade later, I got a job at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Princeton and lived in Pennsylvania, the nearest community with affordable housing. The new development had lots of children in the same age range as ours, so we made friends with many of their parents. I recruited a couple of fathers to a hybrid game of street hockey. One of us played goalie, defending a small hockey net placed in front of the garage door, while another player took 5 shots from about 20 feet away. The three of us would alternate through the two positions, and kept track of the score, determined by the number of goals we scored minus the number of goals we let in.
Seemingly overnight, I became a mediocre goal tender. Prior to that day, I had no problem keeping my eye on the ball as it landed in my glove. But now, the ball seemed to disappear as it came at me. Instead of catching the ball, I instead ducked to get out of the way. Shortly after, we moved to Pullman and I started my academic job, which involved writing many proposals late into the night.
One night as I was returning from our study to the bedroom in semi-darkness, I noticed that one of my eyes saw the stairs and terrain before me with great clarity, but the other eye was blind. In a panic, I ran to the bathroom to take a look and noticed that one eye was dilated while the other one was a tiny pinprick. To my relief, both eye equilibrated to the same size.
After that night, I noticed increased eye fatigue at my computer and the one-eye blindness became routine. This motivated me to see an ophthalmologist, who incidentally was an astronomy enthusiast and had an interest in physics; he took off Thursday afternoons from his practice to do research in my lab. He found that my left eye's alignment was off, so prescribed glasses with prisms. Otherwise, I had perfect vision requiring no other correction, so I put off the option of having surgery.
By this time, I was no longer able to knock a baseball out of the park. Even making contact with the ball was a challenge.
Over the years, the amount of prism correction required grew and I needed reading glasses. These two effects working together required precisely tuned glasses, making it difficult to get the prescription right. A few years ago, I designed a test pattern on my computer screen to measure all the angles, and found that my lenses were off by about a millimeter. My new optometrist (my fried had moved) remade the glasses, and they worked well. The downside of these tight tolerances was that I could not correct for both reading and distance simultaneous in a progressive lenz. Since my distance vision is still pretty good (sliding from 20/10 in high school to 20/20 now), I have no need for distance glasses aside for prism correction.
Another side effect of my condition is that my eyes are better aligned when I look downward. As a result, I see double if I am looking at a screen that is above eye level. At the movie theaters I need to sit in the back to get a comfortable view, and in large lecture halls, I can be found sitting way in the back with the bad boys.
Recently I got a new prescription, and after 3 tries, my glasses still were not working. Before making an appointment with my optometrist for a forth tweak to my glasses, I purchased a 1 diopter and 2 diopter prism, which I used to determine that I needed an additional 3 diopters. The optometrist pointed out that such a large correction was possible, but that the eye would get accustomed to it and would drift further. Also, he told me honestly that he was losing money, but would make another set of glasses with more prism if I got the blessing of a specialist.
To make a long story shorter, I saw one specialist who suggested surgery and a second specialist who did the surgery. The fact that tipped the scales for surgery was the realization that even with the stronger prism correction, my eyes were so unbalanced (because the large amount of rotation cannot be corrected by any means) that the correction would be far from perfect and that eye fatigue would limit my time at the computer -- a requirement of my job.
Yesterday morning I had surgery to correct my fourth [trochlear] nerve palsy in my right eye. The procedure is simple, but required general anesthesia. The surgeon basically balances the muscles by scraping a little off the stronger one. My surgery took just 11 minutes, but the results are astounding. The morning after, I am using cheater reading glasses from the dollar store, and the page is perfectly clear. Occasionally, the words blur, but that's from my habit of tilting my head to account for the rotation, which is now minimal. So far so good.
What motivated me to write was my experience this morning when I got out of bed after the quizziness from the anesthesia had cleared. Without glasses, I peered out the window at our back yard and the scene jumped out at me in 3D. It was dizzying. The textures of the arbs were rich and clear; a tree branch floated before me, framing the faraway shed. It was like slipping on 3D glasses at the movies after seeing an hour's worth without them. It will take me a while to get accustomed to all this new information that is forcing its way into my head, but I welcome the challenge. I might just take up tennis again!
