#TBT - The Eyes of March

I drew a bum hand in the genetic lottery. I love my parents, but it's totally their fault. I was born with strabismus (crossed eyes). My right eye was a lazy bum, didn't bother focusing on what I wanted it to and the turn got worse as the muscles relaxed. I had a lazy eye.

There are few things more traumatic in elementary school than being the weird one. I was supposed to wear a patch on my eye all day long, which just made the problem more noticeable. Around third grade, I started sneaking extra patches into my backpack, I'd put one on in the morning, take it off as soon as I got to school and then put on another in the afternoon right before my mom picked me up. I got a purple scooter for wearing my patch for an entire month, but I still feel a tiny bit guilty cause I cheated… (sorry Mom and Dad!) Unfortunately, being that kind of different never becomes cool, so things didn't get easier as I got older… people just started saying things behind my back instead of to my face.

As a kid, I couldn't see 3-D. I remember seeing Captain EO at Disneyland and thinking everyone in the theater was mental. Why on earth were they trying to touch the screen? Didn't they know it was far away at the front of the room? I asked my dad and he explained to me that for everyone but us, the movie looked like it was coming out of the screen (my dad can't see in 3-D either, although because of a slightly different issue). I never really thought I was missing out, having been born with this disability I had learned to work around it without realizing it.

While working for Disney, my eye came up pretty frequently. I had really great health coverage so I started researching my options. Surgery seems obvious, but alone it is only a cosmetic fix. So I spent a year in vision therapy, very similar to physical therapy with a focus on the muscles controlling the eye. We had to teach my right eye to pull its weight and work as part of a team. Eventually, my therapists decided I was ready for surgery! Because the right eye hadn't been doing much, the outer muscle had stretched too long and the inner muscle too short. We had to detach and realign the eye, so 5 years ago, on St. Patricks Day, I paid a man to cut out my eyeball and sew it back into my head. Very gross, but also really cool, right?

Two days post-surgery

The recovery was painful, the muscles in my eye were sore for days and each little twitch gave me the most intense headaches I've ever experienced! Luckily I had a few wonderful friends help take care of me, two weeks off work, and lots of pain meds.

When I finally recovered, the very first thing I wanted to do was watch something in 3-D! Captain EO was gone at the time, so I headed to the Magic Kingdom to watch Philharmagic. I cried. I wept like a tiny little child because it was magic! This simple, "normal," thing that most people do every day without even knowing it was finally available to me too. That day is still one of my happiest memories.

To be honest, that surgery has hardly changed my life at all… but it changed me profoundly. I look just a little different, I can see just a little better, but I feel overwhelmingly more confident. I don't panic when I meet new people or get my photo taken. I don't worry (as much) when people whisper behind my back. Most importantly, I'm not ashamed anymore. Somehow, having the courage to change my "flaw" gave me the courage to own it too, and that has made a world of difference!