Why the selfie post title image, Jake?  Your face isn’t exactly what anybody is going to want to look at.

I’ll tell you why.  It’s Saturday afternoon.  Instead of frolicking at the strip club or spending time with the family, I’m writing you blog posts and answering countless questions.  This is what I look like, making sure you’re taken care of.

My e-mail is full, every single day, with awesome improvement stories.  Sometimes I look at my e-mail and I think, wow, Jake.  You’re a brilliant genius.  Better go check the mail, see if the Nobel prize has arrived yet.  

Not really.  

Most of my e-mail is incoherent rants, hundreds of case specific questions people expect me to answer like I have unlimited time and am some kind of of communist, free-love hippie.  For every question I do answer, I get ten more.  It’s the never-ending hydra of questions.

Even though, there are quite a few improvement e-mails, too.  

callmejack

Some even get my name right.

But let’s not set the bar too high.  Just call me Jack, your free man-servant of all things eye related.  

Where it’s at though, is the forum.  The forum is teeming with brilliant insights, great questions, shared perspective.  And lots and lots of stories going back for years.  It’s a treasure trove, well worth the hassle of getting a BackTo20/20 invite and giving me all your monies.

Check out Bruno’s January update:

bruno-jan-update

Bruno started off with fairly low myopia.

That’s the hardest part to reverse.  Once you get to 20/20 in decent light, clear flashes, no glasses. you’re right there on home stretch though.  People ask me all the time, do you have students with actual 20/20?

To which I glare incredulously, and say … how couldn’t I.  

This is what we do here.  And also, I’m not doing anything.  I’m just the groundskeeper here at @endmyopia.  You’re the one picking up the thread, putting the tools to use, doing the work.  And if we’re lucky, you share your experiences.  

Reading this site you probably don’t even know how many, many optometry professionals spend weeks and months and years discussing the benefits of atropine (poison, yes) to slow the increase of myopia, or sell thousands of ortho-k lenses to slow the progression of myopia.  You on the other hand, lowly amateur, you actually reverse your myopia, no pricey prescriptions, no poison drops.  You’re a rockstar, and any one of you reading this blog and improving your eyesight could silence a room full of myopia scientists with your knowledge, insights, and experience.

Just remember that.  You’re in the 0.1% on the planet, controlling your own vision health.

Let’s do one more, from the forum:

30 days into my new normalized of R -2 / L -1.5. Here’s my update:

Right eye: 51 cm
Left eye: 67 cm

Indoor Lighting
Snellen without glasses: between 20/100 and 20/70
Snellen with -1 prescription: between 20/60 and 20/50
Snellen with R -2 / L -1.5: between 20/30 and 20/25

Good Lighting:
Snellen without glasses: between 20/60 and 20/50, 20/40 if clear flash occurs
Snellen with -1: 20/40
Snellen with R -2 / L -1.5: 20/20

Observations: lots of double vision. The first few days were rougher than I initially expected. It felt like EVERYTHING was double vision. At that point, the index card concept that I wrote about a few weeks ago actually worked for me in the opposite way. I first numbered the card 1 – 90 to give myself a chance to celebrate the small success of one more day of good vision habits and to encourage patience when I wanted to reduce my prescription again.

Here, with the challenge to my system, I might have felt discouraged or frustrated, but I told myself, as long as I have no pain, headaches, or any indication that I need to back off to a higher normalized, that I would stick with it for 30 Days. Suspend all judgment.

30 days in and it’s working. There’s still double vision, but much of it has settled and it’s much more subtle. I have my office set up so there’s a poster across the room (only about 8 – 9 feet, but far enough to engage mid-distance vision) with various sizes of text that sometimes comes into good focus without glasses. First thing in the morning, I typically get a lot of double vision on it, and then by about lunch time, I can typically resolve that double vision pretty well.

Don’t know if I’ll want to reduce this prescription after 90 days or wait another month after that. I’m hoping that with the daylight increasing, I’ll be able to resume the after dinner family walk and get some good evening stimulus in about another month. This has definitely been a challenging first 30 days, and it’s shown me how important the visual cortex is. This stuff just takes time. Even if I do take 4 months per normalized, I should be able to get myself down to -1 in the left eye by year’s end.

Everyone, keep doing what you’re doing and take the long term view!

That one, from Matthew.  

If you have forum access, here’s the thread.  I do try cover much here on the blog, but the real treasures are definitely over in BackTo20/20.  

Keep up the great work!

-Jake