What Does It Look Like?

We have no idea what things look like to my daughter.    She can’t tell us what things look like in comparison to what they’re supposed to look like because she doesn’t know what they should look like.   We know she doesn’t have a simple prescription-based solution where a lens correction would fix her vision problems.   We just don’t know.

She has a wrinkled retina on which the images coming in to her eyes are distorted, only we don’t know how much those images are distorted.   And by images, I suppose I mean image, since her right eye really doesn’t see anything measurable at this time.   As an aside, maybe the right eye can see things but the brain isn’t paying attention to them or maybe the right eye will begin to see things in the future or maybe it won’t ever see anything again.   For now, let’s just talk about that one, left eye and see what it might be seeing.

This is the view from our front porch.   The top is the actual view and the bottom is my husband’s estimation of what the view might look like.   We think it may look more like the right side of the picture (which is more obscured) than the left side.    For instance, there is a small path light pole just to the left of the walkway at the mulch line.    My daughter has no idea that’s there and has run into/over it before.

This second view is our kitchen.   My daughter is low down, just like the picture.   Her colors are off so she sees things not true and sometimes gets colors wrong.   Again, the right side of the picture is more distorted and may be a better idea of what she is and can see.

My husband had an idea to try and make some guesses at her actual vision and decided to take some pictures into Photoshop to see what he could come up with.   They’re a good guess I think, although I think they likely show more than she can actually see.   Still, she seems to be able to navigate around with the information from the bottom halves of the pictures, so maybe it’s not too far off. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to take our triangular prism to school today for show and tell. We don’t let them take things to school too often but this seemed like a good one to allow.  I told him to be careful and keep the prism in the protective container.   He agreed.   My husband, before we had gotten into the car had further told my son four times to be careful with the prism.   I asked him to give it a rest, because he was going to be careful and the repeated reminders weren’t going to make him any more careful and were conveying the message in fact that we didn’t think he was trustworthy or careful enough to be entrusted with the prism.   Furthermore, it was a $10 prism and we could get another one if something untoward happened to our current one.     I picked up my son from school with a bandage on his thumb, an incident report from his teacher and some very kind words from her that there had been an accident with the prism.   I told her (and my son) it was okay, we’d get another one.    My son had been upset about the whole thing and hadn’t been able to focus for much of the day after the prism incident.   We talked and he had, indeed, been careful—only he was excited too, especially since the prism was so interesting and he didn’t ask to take things to school very often.  He knows we’re not mad.   I told him I put on my holiday wish list not only a triangular prism, but a pyramid prism too.   Maybe we’d get both, who knows?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had her wellness check today.   There was a finger punch (one of those quick stabs) to get a few drops of blood for an iron test.   My daughter didn’t hear what we had called it (a quick punch) and thought instead she had had, “my punishment test”.