"What's wrong with your eyes?!?"

Looking around the corner of the bathroom door I was telling Clarisse to do something (likely to hurry up), when she blurted out: "What's wrong with your eyes?!?"

I find it hard to fathom that in her nearly twelve years of life, she never noticed I was cross-eyed.

Technically I'm not really cross-eyed, or lazy-eyed.  I suffer from fourth cranial nerve palsy. The nerve that controls the muscle that pulls my eye downward doesn't fire, so the muscle never got the signal to control the eye's position. So when I look to the right, my left eye shoots up into the corner since the muscle meant to control it's ascent is essentially absent.

In this lack of alignment, my brain has two images that are too far apart to reconcile into one, so my mind either  juggles both, giving me double vision, or ignores one.  The later, most common option exacerbates the problems as an eye who's image is ignored need not be controlled, so the muscles aren't activated properly.

I've always been extremely self conscious about it and developed crafty ways to mask it as much as possible. I turn my head a certain way, I tilt it to one side, I squint a lot. Either it has been working, or not everyone pays close enough attention to even notice; my own daughter being a case in point. (Or as Aunty Carol just made me realize, some are polite enough not to mention it!)

Slowly over time, the muscles pulling up have shortened and the alignment of my eyes is getting worse.  And apparently my left eye has decided to assert itself forcefully displaying it's oft neglected image into my brain, resulting in more frequent double vision than ever before in my life.

After living with it for over 35 years, I've decided to put my faith in medical science and next September I will have one of the muscles pulling the eye up severed.  This procedure is meant to correct the problem when looking straight ahead. It is unclear what will happen when I look side to side or up and down, but really how much worse can it be than it already is. 

I am very excited by the prospect of looking someone straight in the eye without the anxiety of knowing my eye will wander upward and inward despite all my effort. I won't have to quickly look away to hide it before they notice.  It's a small thing really, but I look forward to it.

Maybe I'll be able to see those three dimensional images in the patterned drawings, or even a 3D movie, or pour a glass of milk with proper depth perception, or catch the car keys when Kiza tosses them to me.

The possibilities are endless.