An old friend of mine told me she had to get a field vision test, and of course my imagination immediately ran away in mistaken directions.
As if she and the doctor were field-testing munitions rather than vision. Better take this out to the testing ground where it's safe!
My next thought was that this was like a field sobriety test, only instead of reciting the alphabet backward starting with the letter M, she would have to read the Snellen chart upside down while standing on one leg.
But no, the test is not about being in a field but rather testing the field of vision, and is more properly called the visual field test (or visual field acuity test). How much can you see in your field of vision that you should be able to see? It's an important test for glaucoma, Graves' disease, stroke, and so on, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. (Note that the word ophthalmology is so frequently misspelled that it's almost an eye test on its own. I see what you did there, AAO -- I see very well.)
There are actually several different types of field vision tests, depending on what the concern is and how much insurance you have. (Joke! I kid because I love.)
Fortunately none of these very serious conditions is a problem for my friend, but it's still a troublesome one: eyelid droop. In her case it's caused by dermatochalasis, or baggy skin in the upper eyelid. It cuts off a serious amount of upper-shelf vision. It's not a serious problem yet, as long as she's not about to be a victim of bird strike or UFO abduction, I guess. You wouldn't know it's so bad to look at her, but the result of the test showed an awful lot of things going on in the upper field that she didn't see at all.
Supposedly it's fixed with a pretty simple operation (blepharoplasty) by the right doctor. I hope it all goes well. She's a good-looking lady and she needs to be good at looking too. And to not be abducted by aliens.
2 comments:
One thing that a lot of people don't know can cause droopy eyelids is cataract surgery. Really nothing they can do about it, apparently; the Clockwork-orange looking thing they have to use to keep your eye open sometimes stretches your eyelid.
Drooping eyelids can cause loss of vision, as noted, just because the eyelid covers part of the eye.
There's a plastic surgery procedure that fixes it. My wife has been putting it off as she also has heart problems and it would require her to be put out, plus get off of blood thinners.
Sorry to hear about it, Sandy; hope your wife is able to cope until such time as surgery is more amenable to her.
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