Many moons ago in a previous blog post I brought up the possibility of a surgery that could be performed on the muscle of my left eye. For three years, I put the surgery off while I fought with myself on whether or not I was mentally prepared to go through with it. As much as I knew I wanted the surgery, I was deeply afraid. It would be my first ever surgery and on my eye nonetheless. On the eye that I’ve never been able to see out of and that has always been a source of intrigue for every person out there once they learn about it, doctors included. What if something went wrong? What if I didn’t react well with the anesthesia? What if I wake up and something is wrong with my right eye even though nothing is being done to it? Yes, the risks were almost nonexistent but my mind was plagued with thoughts like this. So it took some time for me to finally jump on board…
This past December is when I started to seriously process what it would all mean and why I needed to gather my strength to get the ball moving. For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated the way that my left eye goes lazy. Since my left eye has no visual function, it follows the direction of my right eye. That’s why it’s physically impossible for me to ever go cross-eyed. As a little girl, the lazy eye would be more pronounced at times as seen pictured below:
The older I got, a little more strength was gained but not much. Throughout my middle school through young adult years, the more tired I was, the more pronounced my lazy eye was. In the past handful of years, however, the muscle in my left eye has lost more strength and become lazy even when I’m not tired. The point of the surgery is to tighten that muscle so that the eye will better straighten up.
Whenever I take pictures, I immediately focus in on if my left eye is looking straight ahead at the camera like my right eye is. I hardly ever focus on anything else about my features. Only my left eye. Seeing my left eye being even slightly off in pictures heavily weighs down both my self-esteem and self-confidence. It has for years on end. Even when the majority of people I know tell me that they don’t notice it. I see it and for me that’s been more than enough for it to be a hindrance on the way I view myself.
I’ll take a selfie and if I see my left eye is off, I’ll either keep trying over and over until I can *maybe* get a better one or purposefully close that eye/tilt my head a certain way/etc so that it’s not even a factor or hardly noticeable. In pictures with other people, I sometimes ask for a redo, even when I know there probably won’t be much of a difference between the two. More than that, the longer I put the surgery off, the looser that eye muscle can get. I in no way want it to get to the point where it’s just rolling around in there, doing its own thing 100% of the time.
So I built up my strength and at the beginning of this year, I made the phone calls that needed made, had the doctor’s appointment, and last week, I finally had the surgery:
My parents knew from the moment I was a little girl that the surgery would be a possibility at some point in my life if I would choose to do so. I might even have to have the surgery again 10-20 years down the line. I’m choosing to focus on the fact that I finally did it now, after three long years of putting it on the backburner. I was apparently very happy when I woke up in the recovery room and on the way home, I fell asleep in the car holding a container of chicken strips in my lap. Recovery for the first week has been rough, especially the first few mornings. My eye is going to over correct itself for a bit before finally straightening itself out in the coming weeks:
Each day it gets better and I can’t wait to be in pictures/take pictures without having to worry about where my left eye is looking. I seriously believe I will cry happy tears when that moment finally comes. It’s going to make a huge impact on my life.
I couldn’t have done any of this without the support of my people. They know who they are.
Until next time,
~Lex
P.S. Having all of this focus on my eye made me go back and listen to the audio essay project concerning my eye that I created for one of my college courses. If you’d like to go listen, follow this link to my blog post about it 🙂
Love, Life, & Lex 