#LoveMe Challenge – unique vision

In the #LoveMe Challenge, today I’m supposed to share something that makes me unique.

I have a wonky eye. When I was born, both my eyes seemed to work well. But my parents noticed when I was about 9 months old, my left eye began to wander. And I began showing decreased hand-eye coordination reaching for things with my left hand (I’m left-handed and anyone who says handedness is strictly environmental is wrong; otherwise I would have switched to right-handedness way back then). They took me to an ophthalmologist who determined that I had amblyopia which is just a fancy name for lazy eye. For years, I had to wear an eye patch to try to train my lazy eye to get in line. I looked like a mini pirate in a lot of my old photos.

When I finally got old enough to talk, I told my doctor and parents that I could only see fuzzy shapes around an area of blankness in the center of whatever I was looking at. That is not the normal in amblyopia so the doctor had a couple of theories – occular stroke, optic nerve damage, etc. I even had a surgery when I was four to align my eyes a little better. But nothing made a difference in helping the central vision in my left eye come back.

Then, a few years ago, someone sent me a link to Coats Disease. Suddenly, it was like my vision cleared. OK, bad pun, but I was reading about me. I was actually a little excited that what was wrong with my eye had a name and symptoms exactly like what I have. Of course, me being me – it is a rare condition. Less than 200,000 people in the US have this, although I wonder if there’s at least a few thousand like me – who never knew their vision issue had a name. By the way, rare conditions are usually less than 1 in 2000 (according to Orphanet).

I guess having two really uncommon, even rare, health issues – amelanotic nodular melanoma and Coats Disease – makes me pretty darn unique. Although I would have preferred freakish supermodel genes and thick hair instead of being a freakish medical malady specimen. Not sure how I got the wrong end of this…