Memories of the Optometrist
Due to a hereditary condition, I completely lost the vision in one eye as a child. Because I wasn't using that eye, I developed strabismus and had surgery for it. I had to visit the optometrist regularly every year and have many memories of those visits. One clinic I went to often as a child had a game console for kids to play on. The game was so much fun that even now, recalling the memory brings a strangely good feeling. Another clinic had a vending machine that dispensed balloons filled with helium gas. I also remember pulling one out, inhaling the gas, and laughing at the change in my voice.
Unlike other clinics, there are rarely injections at the optometrist, and unless you're having surgery, the treatments aren't painful like they are at the dentist. So, there weren't many bad memories. But there is one, just one, bad memory I have of the eye clinic: the visual field test.
The Fear of Visual Field Tests
As most people know, the visual field test starts with instructions to rest your chin on a stand, hold a button, and press it immediately whenever you see a flash of light while keeping your gaze fixed on the center dot. This is called the Goldmann Visual Field Test. But humans have both central and peripheral vision. I still find peripheral vision fascinating—it's something you see, but you don't really "see" it. No one reads a book using their peripheral vision, right? It's easy to miss things in your peripheral vision if you're not paying close attention. That must have been what happened to me when I was a child taking the test.
I was simply honest: I pressed the button if I saw the light and didn't if I didn't. But the doctor got angry and frustrated right in front of me. "Why do you press it one time and not the next when it's the exact same spot?!" He wasn't yelling directly at me, it was more like he was talking to himself, but I witnessed his frustration with my actions. It must have become a kind of trauma for me. After that, I was always nervous whenever I had a visual field test.
The Motivation Behind Creating the Visual Field Test App
Well, more than 20 years later, I recently had to take a visual field test at the eye clinic again. I was still nervous, but something had changed. Perhaps because my condition had progressed so much, I couldn't press the button even once. It could have been because I wasn't wearing my glasses, or maybe I was overly cautious, hesitating too long even though I felt something in my peripheral vision, or perhaps it was due to my strong self-doubt. It could also be that the test spots were too small to be seen through the gaps in my already damaged vision.
That's when I realized: the visual field tests at the clinic were no longer meaningful for me. So, I created a simple app that allows me to do my own visual field test. I made this app because as a patient with a progressive condition who is constantly losing my vision, I felt a desperate need for something like this. I'm always curious about how much I can see and how much more of my vision has been lost since the last time. So, what I used to do was, I'd arbitrarily place a dot in the center of a program like Paint, stare at it, move the mouse randomly around it, and click to mark the areas where I could perceive the mouse. I did this daily to record what I could see. But this process was so tedious that I kept starting and stopping.
Using my memories of the tests at the clinic and my own intuition, I created a visual field test app. Later, while reading a textbook on ophthalmic examination, I learned that what I had created was a "dynamic visual field test." In the app I made, the dot moves, and when I press the button because I see the dot, that visible point is recorded. The locations of the dots I failed to click because I couldn't see them are also displayed. I found it to be quite useful, so I'm sharing it here. Click here or try it out through the "Online Free Tests" section in my blog menu.
If you want to track changes in your vision, you must do the test under the same conditions every time. For example, you can't test it once from far away and then once from up close. I plan to continue creating and uploading many more apps that I find useful.