I mentioned earlier that I misread my schedule and missed a day of work. Let me explain what I meant. This wasn't a quick glance mistake, I would take the schedule down and meticulously follow the days and write down when I was scheduled. Before I would leave that day, I would check and re-check my notes next to the schedule before I left. To me, what I saw on the schedule and what I had written down were absolutely identical. Even when I was informed I had missed a day, I re-read the schedule and still couldn't see what they were talking about (I just wanted to explain that a bit better).
Although I had dizziness and headaches after vision therapy, my reading skills had improved. They weren't going to win me any reading contests, but at least I knew what days to be at work. So my reading had improved and I was ready to start my senior year a new man. I was not expecting to have light become my enemy. Now from what I read, photophobia is an aversion to "bright" light. But to me, all light is bright. The light that a lamp gives off through a lamp shade is just as bright to me as a bare lightbulb. If I am in a room that is all dark except for one light, my eyes still hurt from that one light. Over the past 8 years, I have learned a few tricks but really, light still hurts my eyes (one of my deepest fears is that it always will).
Do me a favor, look around you right now. Look at all the light sources in the room in which you are sitting. Now that you recognize the different sources, look around at all the light being reflected or bounced off of all the objects in the room. Out of habit, this is what I do in every room I walk into. I quickly assess the light and reflections in a room and choose how to approach it. I will find the sources of the most light or the most painful light and sit in a way to avoid that light. For example: I sat down at my computer tonight with one lamp on in my room. Before I started typing, I looked around and realized that the lamp was reflecting harshly (at least to my eyes) off my water bottle on my desk. So I moved the bottle around until I found a spot in which it didn't catch the light.
Trying to totally avoid light during the day is right up there with trying to only breath pure oxygen from the air around you (it's not gonna happen). What I do is try to avoid the worst of the light. I wear my sunglasses everywhere, even on dark rainy days. I am never outside without my sunglasses, better yet, I can't be outside without my sunglasses. I wear them inside buildings and restaurants (people look at you as if you are some poser who think's he's bad ass. All I can say is, I don't "think", I "know"). :)
Several days had passed since the room caved in on me and my headaches had increased even more. I no longer recognized them as headaches but rather thought of them as migraines. Reason being is that the pain seemed to be on a whole new level than what I had experienced with all the headaches in the past. Light had become my enemy. It was so intense and leaking into my eyes from all angles. Direct light from the ceiling lights, beams of light coming in from the windows, light reflecting off of any surface, all marching into my eyes and leaving pain in it's wake. During the day there was no way to escape it, it was all around me.
A few months into my senior year and my eyes were getting worse. My reading began to slip again, I almost always had a migraine, and my mood had become something most foul. I was irritable and angry, I would snap over the littlest things and my mom decided that this was more than just the normal teenager angst. She came to me and asked if I was ready to go back to vision therapy. My reaction was less than calm, I exclaimed to her that I "would never!" step into the man's office again. He never believed me and I was not going to go through that again. She then calmly asked me if I was ready to get a second opinion. I wasn't exactly thrilled with this idea either. What if this second opinion didn't believe me? What if he/she said the same thing, that I was just making this up for attention, I was a teenager after all. I didn't want to face another person that would quickly judge me for my age and maturity without really considering what I was saying.
In the end I realized mom was right and we called a specialist in Grand Junction. Dr L was a specialist that primarily works with vision problems in small children. Seventeen year olds really weren't in her demographic, however, for some odd known reason she said yes and two weeks later we were in her office. By this time, my eyes were quickly failing, my world was getting brighter and brighter. I sat there, having an eye exam (an event that had become common place for me in the last two years) and hoped and prayed that Dr. L would say something along the lines of, "yep, there's a major problem". She sat back from her equipment and turned in her chair to my parents and said, "Well your pervious diagnoses is correct, he has Esotropia and Esophoria. The only thing to do is more vision therapy." My heart sank and I got a lump in my throat as the anger swelled within me. I clenched my fist and said, "NO! I will not do anymore vision therapy. It hurts and I refuse to do it. I can not handle the headaches it gives me!" At that very moment, Dr L turned to me and said, "what?". I said, "it hurts my eyes and gives me headaches. I'm not going to do it!" Without even a blink, Dr L quickly turns back to my parents and says, "We need to schedule him for a MRI as soon as possible!" (Wait! An MRI? That's more than the reaction I wanted to hear!). TBall
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