| Published on | in Personal | | |
A twinkle with the eye changes the whole picture.
When I was just about 20 years old, i.e., in the mid-1970s, I saw an ophthalmologist and in the course of the examination, he carried out the Schober Test, which is used to check binocular vision ("lazy eye"). This test consisted of a red circle and a green cross being projected to the wall and a red/green filter in front of your eye.
This is, what happened to me...
So I was undergoing exactly that test, and the doctor asked me if, and if so, in which direction the green cross is located in the circle. I looked at the point where I saw the red circle and asked the ophthalmologist, if he would turn on the light for the green cross, so that I could give him an answer. I felt that the ophthalmologist was very surprised. "The light is on," he said. Weird - there was nothing there that I could see. Again I asked him whether he kept the light on. Then I unconsciously I must have twinkled with my eye and changed the direction of my look a bit and - like a miracle, there was the cross. Well, looking at it a bit longer and more intense, it was "gone" again, and again I thought "Hey, switch the light on". I twinkled again - oh, there it is. This was very confusing for the doctor, too, and he just thought that I was suffering from a "kind of colorblindness". He could not know better at that time in the 1970s. So what I learned from that (even though only many years later): This means that even when looking at an object directly it "disappeared", and when "not looking directly" - or as I say today "look around the corner" - it was visible. Today I'm sure that was already an indication for the macular dystrophy, but probably nobody was aware of symptoms of macular degeneration/dystrophy in young people.
So I have probably long unconsciously my peripheral vision strongly with integrated and possibly also "trained" to be able to recognize something more than just "peripheral".
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About this text
Jutta's Story texts were originally written in 2016-2017.
Since end of 2018 I am officially legally blind..
And I am proud to be a member of the Malta Society of the Blind.
