This Day in Drabble History: June 24th & 25th (The Lazy Eye)
1984, 1992, 2008
Hi everybody!
I went out this morning, spiral note pad in hand, to sit and think of ideas for the week ahead. I also like to read the paper and check out social media. Anyway, as I was leaving the local McD’s, I noticed my reading glasses…
It was missing a lens. It’s actually no big deal (unless I wear them in public) because I’ve never been able to see much with my right eye. I have a few different reading glasses, and when the lens popped out of these I thought I’d just keep them in case of emergency. (I spend half my life looking for my reading glasses!)
As I get older, I become more aware and amazed at little things and events that shaped my life. Some were kind of remarkable, so I’ll do some remarking now.
I was born with a condition called amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” The vision in my right eye was so bad, my brain just seemed to block out what it saw, and I used only my left eye. The doctors caught it when I was 5 or 6. The cure for lazy eye was to wear a patch over my good eye, forcing my bad eye to work, but you have to do it when the patient is very young. I was kind of a stubborn kid and didn’t like not being able to see or being made fun of, so I would find clever places to hide the patch. At some point, my parents must have given up. It was a battle and they couldn’t watch me 24 hours a day. The eye never improved and when they took me to another eye doctor a few years later it was too late to be corrected. It made me a little sad, but not that much. It’s not like I lost anything, I had never been able to see our of that eye. I was never aware of another kid having this problem. I was just a weird kid.
It was such a coincidence that the first one I ever heard of who dealt with amblyopia was Charlie Brown’s sister Sally! I bought a new Peanuts book every week, it seemed, and there was Sally wearing an eyepatch because she had amblyopia! I wasn’t so weird after all! Well, maybe I was.
It was fun to have the opportunity to tell this story to Mr. Schulz many years later. He was pleased.
Here are out strips from today’s date and tomorrow’s…