Seeing Inside the Snow and Night Driving

Pamela Spiro Wagner, published poet and writer, maintains the fascinating WAGblog. She has recently been writing about her amazing discoveries as she continues a program of vision therapy.  As a writer, she is able to explain the subtleties of her new-found visual skills extremely well.

In her post "Vision Therapy, Stereopsis and Seeing At Night",  Pamela discusses that she had previously given up driving at night because she could not see well. She then described the first time driving at night after vision therapy:

"Immediately, I could tell the difference. For one thing the whole world seemed better lit now. I could see, well, details where before there had been only darkness, and confusing chiaroscuro. Streetlights defined things, rather than merely casting shadows onto them, and assisted my vision rather than merely making matters worse. I could see into bushes, could see branches and inside the hollows. Dark recesses, doorways became just that: recesses, doorways, and not just patches of darkness, black blurs to stump and confuse me."

In the post "Vision Therapy: Seeing Inside the Snow", she described what it is like to observe something as simple as snow falling:

"It was immediately and stunningly obvious to me that this was something I had “never” seen before, or not in any retrievable memory. What I remembered was that always before snow had fallen in a kind of whitish mass, a jumble of flakes more or less undistinguished from one another, because indistinguishable from one another. I can’t emphasize this enough, how if you cannot perceive depth, you lose detail and even the ability to perceive certain structures because of it."

Anyone who has any question about the potential benefits of vision therapy should spend some time reading Pamela's blog. As a doctor,  it is extremely exciting and heart-warming to read her words.

Be Well!

Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD
Bright Eyes Family Vision Care
Located in the Westchase area of Tampa.