Iterations

As many of you know, three weeks ago today I had surgery on my eyes to correct a muscle imbalance and while the physical recovery has been fairly uneventful, the emotional and existential healing has been incredibly profound. The condition is called Strabismus and basically what happens is that the eyes don’t focus or track together. Let me explain…In the center of the retina, there’s an area called the macula which is basically the functional center of the retina where straight ahead images are processed. Within the macula is a spot called the fovea where the cones are at their highest concentration and it’s here where the image is meant to focus at its sharpest. In most people, if the eyes are tracking together, those two sharp images are combined to create binocular vision. In my case, my right eye was off axis—it was turned in—so the image didn’t focus on the fovea and when my brain tried to combine the two images, since they didn’t match up, I didn’t have binocular vision. Think of it like this—if my lef