Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 8—The Georgia Bulletin, September 1,1983
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A Story Of Faith And Science
At 38, A Woman Discovers How Much There Is To See
BY GRETCHEN REISER
In Scripture, one definition of faith is that a person sees
with “new eyes.”
The phrase seems coined to describe the experience of
Dorothy Skolnekovich, a longtime resident of the Atlanta
archdiocese, who, in her early forties, is beginning a new
life and seeing for the first time that which others have
long taken for granted.
Until three years ago Ms. Skolnekovich’s “world” was a
chaotic and changeable place. Objects that to those with
normal vision seem stationary were moving and
unpredictable in her field of vision. While walking, the
sidewalk ahead might suddenly split into two sidewalks,
criss-crossed and in motion. A person walking towards her
might also “split” into a “house of mirrors” image of
repeating figures, what she called “a wall of people.” Her
MAKING CONTACT - Simple exercises with a
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reaction, not surprisingly, would be to freeze where she
was and to raise her hands in front of her in defense
against this approaching line. As she did so, the lone
person coming towards her on a nearly deserted sidewalk
was likely to turn and give her a strange look.
With some variation in severity, this was the way her
vision had been and the way her world had looked since
she was a little girl, perhaps since birth. She knew no
different and yet, with the will of a survivor, she had
persisted in getting through high school, a technical school
qualifying her as a licensed practical nurse and, eventually,
on to college. She had learned to drive and supported
herself in a variety of nursing jobs. She had been involved
in helping people in many ways.
Despite those accomplishments, she carried the burden
of a label received in childhood, that she was “mentally
retarded” and that she “couldn’t learn.” The
accomplishments of each day were fraught with the
complications of using heightened senses of hearing and
smell and taste - and to a large degree touch - to
compensate for the extreme fluctuations in eyesight. Her
sight affected the way the world looked and the way she
acted and talked and behaved; to other people much that
she said and did was disconcerting.
Letters And Numbers
The same visual condition which caused sidewalks and
people to jump and double had made letters and numbers
unpredictable since she was a child in first grade.
“Was” became “saw” and “cup” turned into “cub.”
Similar letters like “d” and “b” could look identical
sometimes. Spelling and reading were a nightmare which
she recalls trying to circumvent by using hearing and
memory.
Yet though she had had the vision problem for years
and had been to doctors repeatedly, she had been told
either that there was nothing that could be done or that it
was all “in her head” and she was imagining her vision
problems. Her condition was not correctly diagnosed and
treated until she was 38 years old and sent, by a DeKalb
Community College counselor, to see a Stone Mountain
optometrist.
Through the care and concern of the optometrist, Dr.
Daniel Gottlieb, and his staff that day proved to be the
beginning of the healing that had eluded Dorothy for so
many years.
She walked in the door in early January 1980 with four
pages of handwritten description of her vision problems
which the school counselor had asked her to write out.
Over a brown bag lunch in the examination room at the
rear of his offices, Dr. Gottlieb read the pages and
reflected.
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He saw a grown woman, very agitated and excited. Tht
pages he read looked as if they had been written in several
different handwritings. The spelling was “atrocious,”
filled with reversals of many letters and phonetic spelling
He started asking questions like “Who wrote this?” “How
many times did you sit down to write this?” and “Is this
true?”
Privately, Dr. Gottlieb said later, he was recalling hij
parents’ admonition to listen well and “to have faith in
people.”
To himself, he was thinking, “Try to believe that she’s
telling you the truth.” ^
The First Problem
By the end of that day, after several hours of
examination, he had “a problem or problems identified - s
or so I thought.”
Essentially he saw that Dorothy’s eyes did not work
together, that one or both eyes turned, a condition called
“strabismus.” Some 15 years earlier she had had ey$
surgery to try and correct that tendency of the eye to
turn inward or outward. Surgery is commonly
recommended by ophthamologists, Dr. Gottlieb said, but
he strongly believes that surgery alone is basically $
cosmetic approach, treating the way the eyes look rather
than the way the eyes and brain function together.
“What I saw was to notice that her eyes weren’t
working together. I said, “You see two of me, don’4
you?” I tried to assure her that what she was seeing was
okay to see. I tried to be rather global in stating that
seeing double affects your perception of everything. As
your eyes separate, so does your world.” *
For the first time Dorothy received bifocal glasses that
corrected her vision at close range. It was the first time in
her life she’d been reassured about her perception of the
way things were. 4
In addition to fitting Dorothy with new glasses, Dr.
Gottlieb recommended that she begin a program of vision
therapy, a program of treatment that teaches people how
to use their eyes effectively. Through a variety
organized activities and visual challenges, therapy
retrains eyesight so that the person sees the world as it is
and learns to differentiate between spaces and objects.
Basically, optometrists who practice vision therapl
have been proclaiming that vision is a learned process that
builds from one stage to another, just as a baby gradually
learns through sight and also through the use of the whole
body, where objects are, how far away they are and t&
“see” in a landscape where objects are in relation to one
another.
For Dorothy this process had never taken place because
the correct images had never been perceived in the first
place. As far as she knew, the world was moving and
unstable.
“She could never trust that something she saw at one
moment would be the same at the next,” Dr. Gottlieb
said.
“She had nothing to base her perceptions on.
Everything was confused and not consistent.” ,
A Question Of Faith
For Dorothy, one thing that had been consistent was
her faith. As a teenager she had sought out religious
instruction on her own, going to the door of a
Pennsylvania Catholic church and asking about this man
she’d heard about in school, “this man whose name I
couldn’t say, but the book said He changed peoples lives*
and I want to know if he can change my life because I
needed a change.”
The priest who answered read to her, giving her
religious education and she started going to daily Mass*
Years later, when she was undergoing the stressful changes
in her vision, she drew continual strength from the
sacraments, going as often as possible to Mass and to
*
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■Jbnfession to sustain her hope and to be restored. The
support of a prayer group, and of her friends at the
Monastery in Conyers, were as critical as the visual
therapy she began to receive, she said. “I couldn’t have
Aade it without faith.”
Dr. Gottlieb, 33, had opened his practice in Stone
Mountain seven years ago, after graduating from the
Pennsylvania College of Optometry with a Doctor of
Optometry degree in 1974. A Fellow of the College of
Optometrists in Vision Development and of the American
Academy of Optometry, he has seen vision therapy
become increasingly well known and accepted. When he
came to Georgia he was one of two doctors in the region
specializing in vision therapy, but has been joined over the
years by others and has seen the care recognized by the
tjiedical field.
Yet, despite his experience, in Dorothy’s case, because
of her age and other complications, a commitment and
mutual learning process unfolded which was highly
unusual.
The degree of commitment emerged first in Dr.
Gottlieb’s willingness to begin her program of vision
therapy without knowing when or how he would be
Ipimbursed. After nearly a year’s wait and a futile attempt
to convince the state Vocational Rehabilitation program
to cover the cost of her treatment, they started on vision
therapy without certainty of financial support.
» One of the first efforts was to train Dorothy’s eyes to
work together, to “fuse” the multiple images into one
stable image. Like a young child, she began to see large
objects and moving objects first. One day she came into
Sie office and asked “if you could see birds’ wings in the
air.” She had “seen” for the first time a bird in flight.
Perhaps the most challenging moment came when at
the insistent question of a two-year-old child she was
coring for, Dorothy tried to identify something that was
“around her ... always behind her.” The object
sometimes was big and sometimes small, she said. Dr.
Gottlieb, who knew that therapy had brought her vision
(B a stable state, feared that she was “psychotic.” He
asked her to show him what she was talking about. It was
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PAGE 9—The Georgia Bulletin, September 1,1983
NEW SIGHTS - Using red-green filters
depth and full
the shadows of objects, including her own shadow, she’d
never seen before.
A notebook she was asked to keep describes in a poem
her reaction to “a friend in the air” as she watched a
squirrel picking its way along a utility line. As the therapy
progressed, she was trained to pick out smaller objects and
finer details.
The Second Revelation
A new level of commitment also emerged. As part of
her college program at DeKalb, Dorothy needed an
internship in a working environemnt. With her vision
problems, her options were sorely limited and, to meet
her need, Dr. Gottlieb agreed to let her work part time in
his office. The closeness that developed led to a startling
new discovery.
In June, struggling with final exams, Dorothy told Dr.
Gottlieb that she had done poorly on an English test
despite studying. She thought she had written over her
own handwriting.
“I knew she had studied ... I knew (her vision) was
fused at that point... I couldn’t for the life of me figure
out what had happened,” Dr. Gottlieb recalled. He
reviewed the green exam paper. Line after line were
written on top of each other. When he asked why she had
written it that way he discovered she couldn’t read it
back. He took out the green appointment forms she had
been using in the office on a regular basis and asked how
she filled them out. She had memorized where every
question and space was on the complex form. “It never
occurred to me that I was supposed to be able to read
what I had written,” she said.
Dr. Gottlieb took the exam sheet and placed it on the
brown office rug and asked her to find it. She couldn’t. He
tried it again in another room and again, to Dorothy’s eye,
the paper vanished.
They had discovered that despite overwhelming odds
against it, Dorothy was almost completely lacking in
red-green color perception. “Less than one percent of
women have color perception problems,” Dr. Gottlieb
said, and yet he discovered in Dorothy the most severe
red-green perception problem he had seen.
The world of objects that had emerged for her had been
black and white. Now, with the use of a special red
contact lens, and later a very light green lens in the other
eye, she began to see in fullness, both the red and green
objects she hadn’t seen before and the complete depth
perception that the loss of color had affected. It was just
before Christmas 1981 and she walked into Kroger’s and
was horrified by the sight of what appeared to be
grotesque skirts hanging from the ceiling - the season’s
fabricated Christmas trees.
The difficult process of identifying began again. With
the color lenses, therapists began to teach “visual
closure,” the skill utilized in dot-to-dot pictures which
complete a partial image and make it whole. In addition
to teaching her to “control her eyes,” therapists also had
“to teach her to trust her eyes,” Dr. Gottlieb said. After
so many years of an unstable world, Dorothy had to leam
that she could walk straight ahead without putting her
hands out to ward off the unexpected. She had to leam
that the world had stopped moving.
Dorothy works at visual exercises that train her in
color perception.
Conquering Fear
There was a final lesson, perhaps most difficult to
conquer. For years, to fight off despair, Dorothy had told
herself that she wasn’t “mentally retarded” but that when
her vision was corrected she could learn. Suddenly with
therapy and special lenses, she could see, but she lacked
answers.
“Now I was seeing and I knew I was seeing, but I didn’t
know what anything was,” she said.
It was difficult to express that suddenly alive fear about
her own intelligence. Somehow, a sense of her own doubts
emerged in a conversation with Dr. Gottlieb and he firmly
pointed out that she could not understand all that had
happened without normal intelligence.
“I had put myself under his care visually and he
accepted that. When it came down to breaking my fears of
being mentally retarded, when he really commanded me
to stop thinking in those terms, it broke the power of it,”
she said.
Armed with a camera and questions, she spent months
taking pictures and bringing in objects to identify,
including, “flowers in the air,” when the dogwood
blossoms came out in the spring. It was her first
understanding of leaves on trees.
Two years of vision therapy ended in December 1982.
Christmas gifts - and birthday presents -- exchanged
between the office staff and Dorothy tend to be always
red and green, just to keep her on her toes. Dr. Gottlieb is
eager, six months later, to hear her grapple with describing
the Stone Mountain laser light show. After graduation
from DeKalb with an associate’s degree, she has enrolled
this fall at the University of Steubenville, Ohio, seeking a
bachelor’s degree in mental health with a minor in
theology. She really would like to wind up with a
doctorate degree. She has moved in the last year from
practical nursing to teaching nurses’ aides.
Despite the completion of her therapy, she has left her
mark on the office, Dr. Gottlieb says, acknowledging that
“we were discovering as well as she was.”
For quite awhile “it was difficult to believe Dorothy
had gone this far in her life without knowing what leaves
on a tree were or a Christmas decoration ... It was
incredible,” he said.
Working with her “in a way changed our whole way of
looking at people,” he said. “It gave us greater insights
into the whole person. It was revealing. It was exciting.”
Instead of thinking about a vision problem, they’ll be
asking what it means to a person in their work and their
play.
What they learned in treating Dorothy will likely help
people who are children now -- children who may come in
for an exam and discover Dr. Gottlieb playing a game
where they have to find the green paper he’s hidden on
the floor.
Looking back, Dorothy sees the passage as one that
required all the support she could draw from the
community around her, the office, and her friends and
from her faith - from daily Mass, from Communion and
prayer.
“Even though it seemed impossible at times,” she said,
“because of my relationship with the Lord I was able to
keep going.”
