 |
| Glasses for Lars! |
All of Lars's hearing and vision screenings when he was little were always normal, so it's quite a shocker to discover a significant visual impairment at the end of 7th grade. Obviously this has affected his depth perception as well, which might explain why Lars has never been able to catch a ball no matter how patiently my husband has tried to coach him. Poor kiddo!
Bernie whisked Lars off to the eye doctor first thing Monday morning, and the eye doctor confirmed that Lars needs to be wearing glasses full time and also said that, since Lars's left eye has been compensating for so long, he may even need some kind of vision therapy to "retrain" the left eye. I helped Lars pick out his frames Monday afternoon and even though they told me it would take 1-2 weeks for the glasses to come in, we were delighted when the eye doctor alerted us that the glasses were ready to be picked up yesterday after school.
And what does Lars think of all this? He says "WOW!! There are SQUARES on roofs!" Apparently he could never make out individual shingles before. I can't believe it took so long for us to realize he had a vision problem, but better late than never!
7 comments:
it is amazing how vision impaired think what they see is normal. When my daughter was in 6th grade we realized she needed glasses when we all saw an eagle in the sky and she couldn't - took her for glasses and she walked out of the building looking at things and said "wow you can see all the leaves on the tree" and we realized she had been seeing blobs of green!
I didn't get glasses until abut the same age bracket. Had trouble in school seeing the words on the blackboard too.
He looks great in his glasses!
I got glasses in 5th grade when my teacher noticed me squinting at things across the room. I said exactly the same thing your daughter did! It was amazing to see individual leaves. My mom felt terrible, but I just didn't know any different until then.
My son encountered the EXACT same thing, even in the same grade! He wore glasses for about two years and his eyes returned pretty much to normal (weak right eye). He now only wears glasses to drive (like me!).
You may find that the glasses bring his vision into a 'normal' range and he may not need them at all in a few years (or only a little bit). I thank the heavens that we stumbled onto the vision problem when we did, it could have been so much worse!
I "discovered that my son needed Bi-Focals when he was in 3rd grade! I had no clue that he could not see well At All! He was even somehow compensating reading but had always struggled and we thought he might be dyslexic. When he got his glasses and walked out of the office he looked all around and jumped for joy, he truly had never seen leaves on trees or pebbles on the ground. I felt terrible, like the worst mom ever.
I honestly thought that part of the 'trick'f school was that the teacher wrote on the board with dotted lines. (Talk about word prediction software...I invented it in 1956! in my own head.) After my mother finally noticed I kept holding things close to read them (she kept correcting me to hold them away from my face) I was checked. After that, though, stop lights were no longer amazing bursts of colorful light! Sigh.
If Lars did not see a *pediatric* ophthalmologist, it might be worthwhile to have him see one. Our son had exercises with prisms (twice a day, no big deal) and his muscle imbalance was corrected in 3 months, much to the amazement of the doctor. (I gather we were his first truly compliant patients.) But all of us have serious myopia... ah, genes!
Post a Comment