My eye muscles cooperated well this morning with the new exercise routine. There is still the most discomfort when looking up, esp. in the right eye (poorest vision). It was my first day really out in the world without glasses/contacts in. I rode my bike 30 minutes to the University, and got a feel for how handicapped I am! I tried to focus on distant signs, words, objects until they came into focus.

I found I would start to get a mild headache as my eyes tried to focus, due to a mechanical strain inside the forehead. I seemed to feel an upward pull of a set of eye muscles (there are 3 main sets). When I relaxed these muscles the headache went away and the eyes were forced to focus without the help of structural change around the eye socket. I think this might be key in getting the eyes to start focusing again without strain or squinting.

I went into a mall which made it very clear to me just how out-of-focus everything is right now. It was all a big blur, and I just tried to focus on what I could without straining.

My eyes watered quite a bit on the ride to the University. The ride home I had very little watering. Probably going without contacts for 30 days will help re-calibrate my eyes to a higher level of oxygen supply, which can only be good.

I have also been doing the controversial practice of looking “at” the sun for one minute in the mornings. I haven’t actually looked directly at it yet, just focusing on a very bright cloud next to the sun, and only to tolerance. I’m finding that this is immediately painful to the eyes to continuously focus on something bright (slight burning feeling), but that it may be expanding my homeostatic range of acceptable incoming light frequency. The dark shadow negative only lasts about a minute after, which assures me that no long-term damage is likely being done. I feel this is a helpful experiment because I have been almost blinded in the past by bright environments and perhaps I can prevent this by small, regular exposure to bright lights. Side benefit of eye attention.

In five more days, I expect my vision to have improved 1 point per eye, as “promised.” I plan to have an optical exam at the end of my 30 day experiment to see how much my vision has improved. I can pretty much guarantee my vision baseline is the same level of last year’s prescription.

Unfortunately I had to wear my glasses for about 4 hours tonight for my hobby as a valet car runner. Kinda necessary. Hope it didn’t set me back any! I should be able to go all day Friday without any correction (no driving).

SCIENCE!!