I arrived at the Sunnyvale Caltrain station and there was no parking in the train parking lot. Instead, I parked in a municipal lot across the street from the train station and risked getting a parking ticket since the parking lot had a three hour limit. I parked, ran to the station and arrived breathless to the platform.
About an hour and a half later, I arrived in Berkeley. The UC Berkeley perimeter bus picked me up in front of the Berkeley BART station and the Kenyan bus driver was discussing the Olympic torch protests in San Francisco with another passenger. We turned the corner of Hearst Avenue and Piedmont and arrived at the Mining Circle stop on the university campus. A fire alarm had sounded and many students were exiting one of the buildings. I joked with the bus driver that probably one of the students was stressed about an exam that day and had pulled the fire alarm to cancel the exam. We both doubted there was actually a fire. I remembered my first Economics exam being canceled because a scared student had turned on the alarm. The professor fumed at the stupidity of the student’s actions and the expensive costs to the university to pay for a false fire alarm.
Little did I know that I would soon face the most difficult exam I had ever taken on the Berkeley campus. I had no fire alarm to pull.
I had been waiting half a year for an appointment in the Binocular Vision Program at the University of California at Berkeley School of Optometry. Due to international travel, I had to cancel my two previous appointments. Given the small clinic staff, getting an appointment is quite difficult.
The doctor and resident asked me about my eye history and I told them about being born with strabismus, crossed eyes. I also told them about my previous surgeries and about my recent discovery that I could not see in three dimensions. The doctor was familiar with the Oliver Sacks’ article Stereo Sue about a woman in her 40s who developed three-dimensional vision after having limited depth perception her whole life due to being born cross-eyed. That article turned my world around and I too wanted to know if I could have depth perception after living my whole life in a flat world. I came to Berkeley for two appointments at the Binocular Vision Program to determine if I did have any chance of seeing depth and using both eyes. Since I had never used both eyes together, it was possible that my brain had never formed the brain cells to process 3-D images and fuse vision.
For an hour and a half, the two women performed many tests on my eyes to see how well my eyes worked together and separately. I had to put on funny plastic glasses that had one red and one green lens and look at a colored eye chart. Half of the letters on the eye chart could be seen through the green lens and the other half through the red lens. The point of the exercise was to see if I could see all the letters at the same time through both lenses. Sometimes I could see all of the letters and sometimes they would just disappear.
Can things just vanish from one’s sight? Yes they can. It’s as though they don’t even exist. Bizarre.
The real test came when I looked through glass lenses in a big optometric machine at a picture of a cat. Actually, there were two pictures. The left picture was one of a cat without a tail and the right one had the cat with a tail. The aim of the exercise was to see how long my eyes could work together and let me see a fully bodied feline. I was beyond frustration. The tail and head came in and out of sight. It was the hardest thing I had ever done at Berkeley. There was no way to study for this test or prepare. Either the cat had a tail or not. No flash cards, memorization, or cramming. I remembered the fire alarm I heard just before going into the Optometry School. No test I had ever taken as a student was as emotionally painful as this one. A fire alarm was going off inside of me. Instead of a fire hydrant, tears hydrated my sorrow. Surprisingly, I could see the next image with both eyes for a long time and the doctor and resident were surprised that at the age of 31, I could maintain the whole picture for so long. They didn’t think that my brain cells had developed enough depth perception capabilities for me to be able to use both eyes.
Teary eyed, I listened to the doctor and resident confirm my appointment for the next week at the same time to do another battery of tests.
I left the clinic and walked along the campus to meet my friend Elie to go to San Francisco together on BART. I tried as hard as I could not to erupt crying. I so wanted to know if I was a good candidate for vision therapy or not, but I had to wait another week.
I arrived at the parking lot in Sunnyvale and found a $47 parking ticket on my dashboard. I tried to do the environmentally responsible thing and take public transportation and doubled my commute time to Berkeley, and all I got was an expensive parking ticket. Damn!
No matter if I looked at it with one eye or not, the parking ticket never disappeared.
P.S. The following week, I found out that I do have the capability of doing vision therapy to improve my depth perception. However, the doctor pointed out that I should not have any expectations. I may not be as lucky as “Stereo Sue” in Dr. Sacks’ article. I am looking into finding a local vision therapist to do the exercises as I don’t want to go to Berkeley once every three or four weeks and risk more parking tickets.