Blog Post 2 Madeline Brennan

I was born with one lazy eye, which didn't necessarily have to be "diagnosed" because you could see it upon instantly looking at my face. The lazy eye affected my vision, my depth perception, and my coordination. As a child I was extremely clumsy and definitely could not play catch. I was briefly in a t-ball league but even that was too much for me. Doctors worked with my parents to try many non-surgical remedies, such as forcing me to sit down and scan the news paper line by line and circle specific letters (to try to train my eyes to move together), and taping a patch over one lens of my glasses, forcing the lazy eye to get to work! After all of these failed, and I was still extremely clumsy and bad at catch, my parents and doctors decided to attempt surgery on me. I was five years old, about to start kindergarten. They wanted to make sure I didn't get behind my peers when we were learning to read.

The surgery went well, despite my mom claiming that she could hear me screaming throughout the entire hospital, and my eyes now work together as a team! If I attempt to cross my eyes, only one of my eyes move, because the "lazy" eye must now stay in place and not deviate. This surgery is a successful treatment for many people with the same lazy eye problems as me, but for some it only works temporarily and their eye starts to deviate again. 

I have thought a lot about how different my life would be if the surgery didn't work for me, or if the surgery didn't exist in the first place. Thanks to modern medical practice, I do not have to live my life with one eye looking off into another direction. Another aspect to consider is access-- some folks would not be able to afford this surgery if they didn't have sufficient health insurance or other financial resources. Aside from the obvious social disadvantage of having a lazy eye (being viewed as a "freak" or having people afraid to make eye contact with me for fear of staring, etc.), my ability to learn and read would have been intimately affected. I would have faced many obstacles in kindergarten and beyond, trying to get my eye to "behave" and help me view materials left to right with both eyes in unison. This is extrapolating a little bit, but if my performance in school was hindered enough, I might not be where I am today. I might have performed poorly on important entrance exams, not gotten into certain institutions, and would have an extremely different life. I'm not saying that my alternative life (my lazy eye life) would necessarily be inferior, just extremely different and probably containing additional obstacles. 

The surgery to correct my vision was mostly practical and partially cosmetic. To be honest, aside from all academic and professional reasons, I am really glad I do not have a lazy eye purely superficially. Even if I could see perfectly well and read just fine with my lazy eye, I would certainly still want it "fixed." I would not like the attention (or lack thereof) my lazy eye would get me, as I prefer to be able to blend in. Thinking about my surgery cosmetically has been very thought-provoking for me. I would like to think that I would be comfortable having a lazy eye as an adult, but I do not think that would be the case. 

^^A photo of me before I became a technoscience cyborg