Woman gains stereo vision with suppression therapy after 48 years

BOSTON – Sue Barry, PhD, told her story of living without 3D vision for her entire life, then with the help of suppression therapy, she was able to gain stereo vision 1 day after her 48^th birthday.

Here at Optometry’s Meeting, Barry explained that she had alternating infantile exotropia and underwent three eye surgeries by the third grade.

As a baby, she would alternate which eye she used for fixation and which she turned in.

Shortly after third grade, she was put in a separate classroom based on her low standardized test score, which the principal felt revealed her true intelligence. Barry’s principal told her mother, “You must face the facts; your daughter is a dimmed bulb.”

Barry had normal-looking eyes as a result of the surgeries, and she had passed the school vision screening with 20/20 vision. The screening tests one eye at a time rather than testing the two eyes working together, she noted.

“My mother knew that the most common response to a problem isn’t compensation, it’s avoidance,” Barry explained. “She was afraid I would grow up avoiding reading.”

Her mother questioned the school authorities, not Barry’s intelligence. “She knew my problems had to do with my vision,” Barry added

While reading, Barry said she would see pictures and words overlapping. Sometimes, when looking at a magazine, letters would double, overlap and move about.

“You can understand how this visual confusion would make me unable to complete a standardized test, when all of the answer circles are in a row” she reminisced.

She could read eventually, with help from her mother and a great deal of hard work on her part. The suppression therapy took time and energy, she said.

“Reading is an endurance activity,” she added. “Reading one paragraph doesn’t tell you how well a person can sustain that ability to read.”

“Forty years later,” Barry explained, “my vision was more troubling. Things in the distance looked jittery, driving was difficult and frightening.”

She went to her optometrist, Steven Marco, OD, who recommended Barry receive vision therapy and referred her to Theresa Ruggiero, OD, FCOVD. Rigero prescribed a course of vision therapy, “that taught me what most learned in 1 month: how to make two eyes point to the same place at the same time.” she said.

The day she started to work with two beads on a Brock string was exciting and memorable to Barry. “The sense of control over my eyes was so empowering and thrilling,” she said.

“Then, after the vision therapy, I went into my car and looked at the steering wheel, and it was floating in front of the dashboard with a palpable space between steering wheel and dashboard. That was my first view with stereopsis, the day after my 48 birthday,” she said. “I was more than 40 years beyond the presumed critical period for stereo vision.”

She explained that she stopped re-reading the same line over and over again. She could read the New Yorker properly, without confusion, and she could use a computer for longer periods of time.

“My experiences in school would have been much easier and less traumatic [with this therapy],” she said.

Barry believes that every child should have binocular vision testing in school.

“I learned that I was not the victim of a visual fate that had been decided in childhood,” she said. “I could fix a problem that had hounded me my whole life.” – by Abigail Sutton

Reference:

Barry S. OD Talks: Through a Patient’s Eyes. Presented at: Optometry’s Meeting; June 29-July 2, 2016; Boston.

Disclosure: Barry reported no relevant financial disclosures.