Suddenly See more

For the past few days I keep getting the song Suddenly Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors stuck in my head. Not because of the content of the song, but because of the title-- on Tuesday evening, seemingly out of nowhere, my double vision started to improve, and I could suddenly see more. Funny how semantic networks work.

So ever since surgery I've been trying to find ways to cope with severe double vision, and I was really worried that it might never go away, because even as other symptoms improved, my vision did not. When you look at the wikipedia page about double vision, they give a picture as an example of what having double vision looks like:

This is extremely mild compared to what I have experienced over the past 4 months. Imagine instead seeing two equally vivid images, displaced from each other by several feet horizontally, about a foot vertically, and rotated from one another by about 30 degrees. To be fair, this did change slightly just as I was at the end of my hospital stay, such that from certain distances and angles, the images were only a foot or two apart horizontally, and the image on the right was sometimes a little ghost-y like in the picture above. But nothing else changed, and from some angles, things looked just as bad as they did initially. I coped mostly by blocking input from my left eye (with an eye patch or by putting tape over one lens of my glasses), but this has the effect of messing with depth perception, and making it hard to see what's happening on the left side. I got used to this but it was still annoying.

Then really all of a sudden on Tuesday evening, I looked down at my hand with both eyes and only saw one hand. And it was in 3D! So I looked up and found that other objects within a 3 foot radius or so were also no longer double. Over the next 48 hours, my range for seeing things not-double increased, and on Friday it was good enough that I went all day without blocking my left eye. I still see double from certain angles, but mostly the double vision is gone. I can't get over how fast it happened.

But, my left eye still doesn't seem to move as quickly and as smoothly as normal, and I'm having to adjust to having normal depth perception, so my vertigo has been much worse these past few days. Vertigo is uncomfortable, but I'll take it in exchange for seeing a vivid 3D world again. Here is a picture of me just taken by Jeff, looking at the camera with two eyes: