Eye Patch Empathy Day

About 2.5 years ago, Ezra was diagnose with amblyopia- otherwise known as “lazy eye”. What happens with amblyopia is that one eye is weaker than the other. The brain basically overrides the weak eye and doesn’t accept vision from it anymore. Eventually, that eye loses connection with the brain- and vision. Remarkably, people with amblyopia often don’t realize that they have lost vision in one eye- their brain truly just takes the vision from one eye and interprets it.

One of the the “solutions” to lazy eye is to wear an eye patch. The eye patch is worn over the good eye, so that the weaker eye is the only one in use, and can send messages to the brain and override the tendency to only take signals from the good eye. Each child has a different plan for eye patching- some have to wear it for hours a day, some have to wear it less than that. Ezra has to wear his eye patch for 2 hours every day, and he has been doing this for 2.5 years. At first, he needed to wear it for 4 hours every day, but after 6 months he had made such tremendous progress that he was told he didn’t need it anymore! Then at his next appointment, he had regressed and needed to go back to wearing the patch for 2 hours a day.

Ezra is the most resilient kid I know- he has had more health struggles than any of our other kids, and is pain tolerance is EXTREMELY high. He is the kid that would probably go a week with a broken bone and barely complain about it, lol. But eye patching is a BEAST and it is hard for him. He often begins asking a couple minutes after it has been put on if he can take it off and sometimes he complains the entire two hours about it. He also asks why he is the only one who has to do it 🙁

So one day I got the brilliant idea that we would all wear an eye patch for two hours- so we could understand what it feels like for Ezra. We did it on a Sunday afternoon – and believe me, after approximately 30 seconds we were all feeling a LOT more empathy and compassion for what Ezra goes through every single day.

It was disorienting and hard to wear that patch! My depth perception was off, and the whole time I just wanted to claw the eye patch off my face. After about 30 minutes or so, my brain kind of adjusted to having it on, but it was still unpleasant at best. The two bigger kids really struggled having it on, and we gently had to remind them that THIS is what it feels like for Ezra every single day! I think they gained a little bit more compassion and empathy on that day, too.

The funny part about this was that my parents had invited a guest over for lunch. So when he came in, we were all wearing a patch hahaha. It’s unsure if he will ever be coming back over again hahahaha. Also my Dad did participate in wearing a patch, but he was at church doing music when we took all these pictures.

I’m so glad that we did this, I feel like it really gave us all a new perspective and made us increasingly PROUD of how hard Ezra works to patch every single day!