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The Girl Who Got Her Future Back
Imagine this. You are in high school. You’ve always been an honor student, yet now you struggle. High school is so hard. No one else seems to find it this difficult. You spend hours every day doing homework and never get it all done, even staying up until 11. You go in before school and after school, whenever you can, to get extra help from your teachers. You study with friends and they seem to know all the material you studied but you can’t remember. You really feel stupid. You never finish tests. You are overwhelmed and always behind.
You used to play the violin and the clarinet. Now this is so tedious that you never seem to get through a half a page of music without losing your place. As much as you like art class, you can’t finish that either and you hate to paint or color your drawings, afraid you will mess them up. Your mother is constantly on your case to get organized and to do things ahead. She just doesn’t understand that there is too much to do! You can’t seem to concentrate. Life is frustrating. Thank heaven for sports, in the fall you play field hockey, then ice hockey and lacrosse in the spring. You run and play hard. The team’s pasta parties, bus rides, and even the exercise are fun and make you feel better. Still, you wonder what’s wrong with you.
You are near the end of 10th grade. Everyone takes a new vision screening test this year. You don’t just stand behind a line and read the eye chart with first one eye and then the other, you do a number of different things. Not a big deal, you can wear your glasses. The nurse asks you what line the music note is on; you don’t even see the note. She skips that part and later asks you about a dot. You know it should be in the box, but you don’t see it there. You tell the truth.
A few days later when your mother comes home and opens the mail, there is a letter about these vision test results and it refers you for further evaluation.
Your mother is confused. You’ve worn glasses since first grade, and seen an eye doctor at least once a year. She makes an appointment with the optometrist. It’s almost September. Summer reading has been incredibly difficult.
In Dr. John’s office, you can read the lines on the wall across the room well. Then he asks you to follow a small light until you see only one as he moves it from close to your nose away from you. He sits in his wheely chair across the room and asks if there is one light yet. There really is one red and one white, so you tell him there are two. He finds it interesting, though you aren’t sure what that means. He does a couple more tests and decides upon a diagnosis; convergence insufficiency. The treatment is four months of vision therapy, one hour a week with the optometrist and 20 to 30 minutes per day. Physical exercise is no big deal to you, but eye exercises? This will be interesting. Your parents discuss the cost. It’s significantly less than your braces were, and could make a bigger difference in your life. So, you go for it.
The first session, Dr. John asks a lot of questions, nearly all of them describe what you’ve been going through. Then you walk on a balance beam and focus on a moving ball. You read one line from a chart on the wall and then one from a paper in front of you. It’s not easy, but he assures you that you’ll get better with practice. It’s hard to fit in more time every night before you are tired. But Mom works with you and you persevere. Each week you and Mom look forward to your sessions with new eye exercises that have illogical names. Sometimes the two of you go to lunch after you’re done.
In about a month, you realize that you had been copying from the board or overhead in school without ever looking down at your paper. It’s so much easier to take notes now, and you can make sense of them! A week later you read a whole page of The Scarlet Letter without skipping a single line! Then, in November, you can actually see a ‘Magic Eye’ picture, and you finally know what everyone used to act so amazed about. As the term goes on, your homework takes less time, you finish tests, life gets easier in general. Your confidence comes back. Over winter vacation, you need to read a book for English class. Wednesday night you get one at the library. You finish it before you go to bed the very next day! It feels great to have a full plot develop quickly, and have planned ahead. You have more fun, enjoy parties and time with friends. While you still work hard, school is not the burden it had been. You start thinking about good colleges and the future.
This is a brief description of what my daughter, Lisa, experienced. We sincerely hope that when you read this, you pass along Lisa’s story to anyone you know who may be struggling like this. It could make a world of difference to a child’s future.
Carol Lach
January 2006
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