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ive not had an exam in ages but i sure feel called out! i must get a good grade at eye exam!!

Taking no prisoners.

Oh. Ohhh. Oh no.

oh no I'm getting a bad grade in Eye something that is normal to fear and possible to achieve

Oh. Oh no.

Damnit.

Oh…oh no

Oh, I misunderstood and didn't connect it to the squinting. Thanks for correcting that! I'll have to ask next time I go in.

so you’ve just given up on winning your eye exams? skill issue tbh 🤨

wait WHAT

whaaaaat

Meanwhile, I have the opposite issue: the eye chart is backlit and I get afterimages from it super quickly, making it blurrier. And then my prescription ends up too strong. Which is also a migraine trigger.

The problem with dilation is that you basically gotta block off the rest of your day and good fricking luck getting home

But if I don't do good at the eye test the teacher doctor will feel like a failure!

i can confirm that trying to "win" my eye exam (aka: "do the best job i could") hurt me. on reflection… obvious. generally when a dr asks you to do something to test something, you ought to do it to the best of your ability, to showcase what your limit is. but not for eyes

All I know is that there's a giant fucking E up on that wall, somewhere!

wait i thought i was supposed to try as hard as possible omfg

I can't tell blurry C from blurry G from blurry O.

welcome 😊

I just need to tell you that I applied this advice at my last eye exam and I got hands down the best prescription I have ever had. Thank you

Thanks for teaching about prisms, my wife had a stroke and they might help her.

Interesting. I’m going to need to look into this, it would explain a lot

fyi binocular vision disorder is a physical difference between eyes that usually is lifelong. you can't make it worse unless you do weird stuff to only one eye. just sometimes the brain can compensate until it can't. you need glasses to correct it.

Hmm no one ever diagnosed me with binocular vision disorder but I do have that bc TBI/double vision. Always wondered if my ADHD didn't help anything in the healing process so that all tracks as well- thanks for the new term

lmao i do this thread like twice a year and I should get a commission from optometrists for how many people immediately schedule an eye exam

Shingles, same nerve as the chicken pox scar (eyelid, missed the eye) Visual pathways are off. Teeth are screwed up. Migraine, TMJ, vestibular malfunction, messed up binaural fusion, retinal bleed from rotational stress...

Nearsighted and wearing glasses since childhood; if I'm squinting, it's either bright light or needing a new prescription. (Yeah, I'm a little autistic. Also.)

The internal oh no just keeps getting louder.

Omg thx

Well this makes sense! Every time I go I get told I have really thick/healthy optic nerves which feels like a 'win' condition in and of itself but I didn't realise I was squinting during the exams til reading this...oops.

I had the chart memorized.

Eye exam?!? I didn’t have a chance to study!

That could explain why I can't see sharply all that far with my new-ish classes.

i feel like i'm learning something interesting about myself right now because, like...yeah of course you try to win the eye exam

i spent a long while doing therapy to correct my lazy eye and i think i would have had a lot easier time if i was just doing what they asked me to do instead of trying to figure out what the correct answer was but i think i would’ve needed normal therapy to figure that out

There's this field of vision test, where you get a clicker and are supposed to click when you see squiggly lines appear, it always seems to activate the "do well at game" bit of my brain.

That's just reminded me of

I read it and immediately went OH NOOOOOO

Paging @chrissyd-comedy.bsky.social 😂

Mind you, I'm pretty sure the optometry test would make a great NT/ND screen.

I immediately thought "how do you win? surely the goal is to get as many correct as possible". Then I went "oh."

SAME 🤣 no one told me I got to play with tanagrams?!?!? I DO THIS SHIT FOR FUN

this thread is old but I need to share that my neuropsych started visibly laughing and had to cover his mouth and leave the room real fast when I started doing the directions/practice stage of the click/don’t click test bc my finger was uncontrollably impulsively clicking already

me: ok I may not show up as ADHD because I get really locked in and competitive with tests sometimes, like I just get obsessed. unless it's a boring test. therapist: yes I know, that is why I'm making you take this test, bree 😭

I simply started hitting the button randomly and then took a nap lol

Oh. It me. Again realizing I’ve been doing life “wrong” 😩

Taking my AuDHD teen to get assessed for binocular vision disorder an being told nope it is just trauma 😬

Oh my gosh I DO THIS. I didn’t even realize it until I read this. And rarely do I feel like my prescription is correct. Thank you!

I love this thread. You are my people. A really cool eye doc once told me that when I went to grad school my nearsightedness would get worse, then better once I wasn't reading as much. She also said nearsighted eyes are greedy, and so tend to ask for the stronger lens on comparisons.

I went for a neuropsych. To unmask, I stayed up really late and had a fasting blood draw first thing; showed up tired, fretful, & they put memory and IQ tests in front of me. Somehow I did too well on the spacebar test. Flubbed IQ, then failed to show ADHD. Double facepalm.

I was going to say this is one thing I haven’t done because my eyes aren’t even that bad but no I have totally tried to win my eye exam before

as a neurotypical who loves tests and exams, my biggest problem is that i accidentally memorized the eye chart.

Oh no… I did this for my first few eye exams, then realized it was self-defeating. Probably partly denial of age-related vision loss

But if I can guess the correct letter based on shape cues and squinting a little then I “passed” the exam, right?

Not me practicing relaxing breathing exercises so that I can get an unnatural reading and "beat" my blood pressure exam in a couple of days.

sounds like when I started getting massive headaches when i was 15. all kinds of neurology stuff, an MRI, no obvious cause. then some nurse looking at my chart asked when the eye exam had been. uh, never? i had extremely good vision?? (it was astigmatism, lol, and looking at the board in school)

damn. yeah. after I got the eye surgery it took me like 3 months to retrain my eyes to not be pulling really hard on the lens all day. literally felt like eye workouts. they had me go outside and look at the horizon and then the ground over and over for like 15 minutes a few times a day

I got special lenses for BVD and my migraines went away completely! I was having them daily. I was also getting motion sick from first person video games and thats gone too

I give myself a pep talk before every eye exam that the best score is the accurate score.

wait what

... win?

I learned this the autistic way in 7th grade - i had a math class with assigned seats, and some kid in the class made fun of me squinting all the time. Once he did that, I was like "oh damn I do squint; and in all my other classes I sit up front so I can see." Also fuck that kid, he was an asshole.

It's scary how much in that PDF is relatable... I didn't know the connection till just this past year.

"Read the top line on the chart" "What chart?" (20/200 in right eye. On a good day.)

For me, it was...I know it can't be an R because I already said that letter so it must be a B. Now I try to say, it's R or B but I can't tell.

...But surely a well-designed test would take into account the fact that people will try their best and remove as much ambiguity as possible! I think, having forgotten every other medical assessment I have ever had.

i stack sunglasses and make my husband drive 😩

They should have disposable dark glasses. (I need more dark.)

My mum literally told me to lie on some about a condition I have (one eye is much more "dominant" than the other) so this has been ingrained in me 😭

It's possible I may have memorized E FP TOZ LPED PECFD when I was a kid

They dilate mine about every other time, depending on what they see. (The weird bit is that one optic nerve is twice the diameter of the other, for no apparent reason.)

....oh

Wait, what? Not everyone tries to win the exam? I feel like I look bad if I can't read it......Huh.....HUH............. A lot to think about here.

Oh no. I feel terribly seen right now.

oh i didn't know this

A big problem I always have isn't necessarily the "winning" aspect, but I end up reading the lines and inexplicably memorizing them so when I switch eyes I have to consciously remember to read what I'm actively seeing and not just rattle off what I consciously know is there