by Christopher

I work as a chiropractor in both Alexandria and Bethesda, so every day I see many people who come in with bodies to be fixed and wounds to be healed (both physical and emotional). In my 23 years of practice I have met people in all shapes and sizes. Nearly everyone I have met has something that he or she would like to change about their body or a health challenge that limits them. My brain is filled with so many stories and secrets that I sometimes feel like the local parish priest.

In searching for a topic for this series, I thought about my increasingly graying yet vanishing hairline, my “why-do-some-women-insist-on-pinching" butt, my large head, or my orthopedically-modified joints but I settled for the one that really has the strongest emotional charge for me.

I have inherited from both of my parents, a pair of rather penetrating big blue eyes. Yes, I have been told that I seem to be able to see through people, making some feel uncomfortable, but, honestly, I don't consciously do that. With respect to body image, it's what you can't see that bothers me the most - what the world looks like through my eyes. If it is true that the eyes are the windows of the soul, then in my case God or the Universe clearly "doesn't do windows."

I have either been blessed or cursed with severe myopia and a whole series of “weird eye problems.” This has resulted in my 'behind the scenes" body image issue. At the age of 3 years, back when there was no such thing as a car seat, I was perched up in the middle of the front seat of my parents' car, when my father saw me excitedly point outside exclaiming, "Doggie! Doggie!" When he looked over at the side of the road, it was clear to him that I was pointing to a rock. His conclusion was either that I had bad eyesight or a vivid imagination. It turns out that he was right on both counts.

Although I managed to squeak by in kindergarten without perfect sight, it became clear that I needed glasses for first grade. It was both traumatic and dramatic. As I recall, nobody else in Mrs. Schreiber's first grade class needed spectacles except for one - me. (Interestingly enough, I recently moved and found those original glasses, felt a shudder, and promptly thew them away - not suitable for the Lions Club). My father, a chiropractor and natural health fan, set to work to have me do eye exercises. There were the side-to-sides, the convergence, and the eye rolls. Eventually, it became our routine to do these every night. The funny thing is that, for a time, they worked! Much to the surprise of my optometrist, Dr. Roach (yup, his real name), my astigmatism disappeared even though he continually used the term "impossible." Nevertheless, despite my father's valiant efforts to save his son's eyes, my vision continued to decline resulting in stronger and stronger prescription eyeglasses.

School situations were difficult. I would leave my glasses in a gym locker so as not to break them outside. It wasn't all that unusual for me to be playing in left field when a baseball would whiz by my head and all I had to go on was my newly developed sense of "sports sonar." Multiple episodes of poor athletic performance resulted in me usually being picked last for team sports. This despite the fact that I could run the 100 yard dash faster than almost anybody in my school. Thick "coke bottle bottom" glasses didn't do much for my social life either. There was no "geek chic" back in the early 1970s. I avoided school dances like the plague.

When I went to Harvard, the image of my eyes was somewhat rescued by my college sweetheart, a cute blonde who decided that yours truly needed a bit of a makeover. She encouraged me to get hard contact lenses and my image instantly changed. I could finally have a conversation with someone without worrying that people were staring at the thickness of my lenses or watching my glasses slide down my nose. Contacts seemed to be my saving grace yet still my prescriptions kept getting stronger and stronger.

Fast forward to the past two years. I began to notice that there was a certain fuzziness in my right eye, a giant blind spot that appeared to be getting bigger and bigger. After ignoring this fact (Yes. Doctors DO make the worst patients), I found out from my new opthamologist that not only was my retina pulling away from the back of my right eye but that there was atrophy and my retina was LEAKING! Yikes! I was informed that this would require a series of eye injections using special substances designed to cease the leaking of blood into my eye as well as stop the growth of bad blood vessels gone wild. Dr. Murphy, my retina expert, and his staff were great with their care but there is something incredibly disconcerting about seeing a giant needle coming at your when you can't blink. Fortunately, 5 injections later I appear to be stable and now I am maintaining relatively good vision.

My vision has been so poor that I have often joked that I could easily be a watchmaker. In truth, in order to read without contacts or glasses, I have to be about 4 inches from a piece of paper - so close that I can see the grain of the paper. My ex wife used to recoil when she saw this, saying, "Poor little blind Chrisetchka... You make me want to cry." That just made me angry. I didn't want pity. I just wanted to be accepted as my current optometrist states, "a nice guy with a lot of really weird eye problems."

There is a bright side to poor vision. The good part of being severely myopic is that I now have highly-developed senses of both hearing and touch. Hence, I can listen really well and have a great pair of hands. As a chiropractor, I've been told that I "give good neck." Not such a bad reputation to have.