Well, tomorrow I go in for surgery on my non-dominant/weak left eye and then I will begin the journey of neural-adapting to that lens. I can't wait to see how clear my vision is when I can look at something with both eyes open and have clear images reporting back to my visual cortex from both eyes.
An interesting thing happened with my vision while I was away 3.5 weeks on vacation. Before I left, I was seeing the text on my desktop computer monitor fairly clearly. My eyes would be about 70 - 90 cm (~28 - 36 inches) away from the monitors when using that computer so that would be in the near mid-range. After nearly a month of staying off the computer except for very brief periods of time on rare occasions and not spending much time focusing on things in that range, I could not get a good focus on the monitors for an entire week after coming back home. Even with my bad eye closed I was seeing double text which told me that I was seeing images of the text from more than one part of the IOL and my brain could not figure out which image to filter out and which to focus on. I had lost my neural adaptation to seeing at that distance due to lack of practice.
After a whole week of working on the computer, I'm finally getting it back and now see the text on the monitor much clearer and no double images, Correct that. I do get a very faint double image if I look at the text with both eyes open but see only a single image of the characters if I close the bad eye. I can't even begin to read the text if I close my fixed (right) eye and look only through my cataract riddled weak left eye. These things tell me that with both eyes open, my brain is taking a little input from my left eye but is filtering out almost all of it and almost all of the image coming out of my visual cortex is from my right eye.
It will be interesting to see if I neural adapt faster to the new lens about to go in my left eye than I did to the first lens that went in my right eye. Will the adaptation process be fast-tracked because by my brain transferring what it has learned about how to use the lens in my right eye over to the left eye once the change is made? Or will the process of neural adapting to the lens in the left eye take about as long as it did with the first eye because both sides are independent so the exact same adaptation process has to be gone through on both sides?
After having gone with the vision in my fixed stronger/dominant eye so much better than in my cataract buggered weak/non-dominant eye for two full months, I suspect that right now my brain is using all of the input from the good eye and filtering out almost all of the input from my bad eye. In other words, I suspect this has made my dominant eye even more dominant than it was before. The question is then, what will happen as I start to neural adapt to and get good vision from the weak/non-dominant eye after tomorrow's cataract surgery? Will my right eye still stay as dominant and will my brain continue to filter out almost all input from my left eye and only look at the input from my right? Or will my brain start to utilize more input from the left and the balance of what input from what eye gets processed/used start to balance out over time and what will that balance be after I've fully neural adapted to both IOLs? These are very interesting questions and I intend to try and answer them in the coming weeks and months.
The other big question is whether the effects the IOL is (the effects the IOLs are after tomorrow) having on my night vision begin to diminish over time? I hope so, because night vision in my fixed isn't very good yet after 2 months. I will write more about this issue in a future blog. Stay tuned!
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