A Nerf Bullet to the Eye
What does a Nerf bullet look like flying toward your eye? I wish I knew.
Like most ten year old boys, my son loves a good Nerf gun fight. He was playing with his friend and cousin and having a glorious time. They were shooting spongy orange darts, darting and dodging bullets, and screaming “cover” or “I’m hit”, all the time laughing with and at each other. Their Nerf war was going great! Then suddenly through the giggling you could hear my son scream in pain and begin to cry – he was hit. A Nerf bullet hit his left eye!
He complained of pain, blurry vision and extreme light sensitivity. I took him to the convenient care medical center at 9:00pm (he was the last patient of the day). He had a corneal abrasion. I couldn’t believe it. A Nerf bullet damaged his eye, luckily temporarily. I am so glad that my son was able to tell me what it looked like to look through his eye. I would have never suspected that a Nerf bullet could do any damage and would not have taken him for treatment if he had not been so insistent that he eye was hurt. He knew that something was wrong; that his vision was impaired.
This eye injury was a quick and easy problem to solve. After the Nerf gun bullet to the eye, he was able to tell me that his eye was blurry, light sensitive, and painful. I did not need to look through his eyes, because he was able to tell me what his world looked like.
My son’s other vision challenges were not so obvious and are not so easily repaired. It took many years for us to uncover his visual processing problems (e.g. tunnel vision, lack of convergence, binocular dysfunction). My son thought his vision was normal; that this was the way everyone saw things. He knew no different. He did not know that anything was wrong with his vision. I wish I could have looked through his eyes even for a few minutes – I would have known that his vision was not norm. It took years to discover his challenges and it will take many more years to overcome these visual differences.
After years of academic failures, vision tests that were “normal”, and teachers who told my son that he need to just try harder – we finally found some answers by seeking an evaluation by an eye specialist recommended by other parents. Years of seeking guidance from professionals (teachers, pediatricians, eye doctors) got us farther away from a proper diagnosis. A few minutes talking with parents at a baseball game about their children’s learning needs, immediately got us to the eye expert we needed to finally have some answers. These parents’ knowledge of their children’s special visual needs, allowed me to peek into the eyes of my son. They described what their children saw and their resulting behaviors. I said – that is what my son does! I was beginning to “see” what he saw.
My son now knows that what he sees it not “normal”. He is now able to tell me what he sees. He can now give me a glimpse behind his eyes. One of the greatest challenges we have as parents is to be able to “look through their eyes”.
