My shitty glove hand has a name: Exotropia
I've got a ton of real work to do today, so I'll just do a brain dump from my eye doc appointment.
First of all, she was awesome and I'll never see another eye doc as long as I live in Houston. The other guy I was going to was such a hack... Thanks for the recommendation, Fred!
Second of all, any time you have your eye doctor saying, "Yeah, that's REALLY off" you know you're in for it.
Turns out I have Exotropia, which means my eyes point outward rather than pulling inward to focus on the same thing at once. This means that basically I only see with one eye at a time, particularly at a distance. I can converge images a bit better at near distances.
Also, my right eye is much more dominant, and what the brain does, instead of giving me double vision, is basically just shut out the image I'm getting from my left eye.
So, think about that: Someone's shooting on me from the right circle but to my far (glove/left) side, I start off tracking it with my dominant right eye, and then somehow have to shift my vision to the left eye in the fraction of a second that it takes for the puck to travel to my net.
Yeahhhh, not exactly a recipe for a save, right? Any wonder a great glove save takes my breath away. It seems like magic to me!
On top of that, there's a secondary condition of my eyes not seeing at the same height. So one is pointing low and wide and one is pointing high and wide.
She said that the brain naturally prefers binocular vision, so it will try its hardest to merge the images, but for me, the eye muscles are pulling so hard in basically opposite directions, that any disruption to my visual attachment to the puck sends me all walleyed again.
It occurred to me on the way home that even the bars on my (certified) cage are enough to cause that to happen, so quick movements in close around my net are just a jumble of visual confusion. Throw in defensemen and opponents and sticks and it's chaos trying to sort out where the puck is and its trajectory.
And perhaps this explains my violent reaction to screens. Somewhere in my physiology, I KNOW that this person in my field of view is making my job nearly impossible. And they. must. pay. I may see about getting a doctors note allowing me to nut screeners without reproach. ;)
I told her that I felt like I could see better blocker side than glove side and she said that made total sense since my strong eye is already sort of wanting to turn blocker side anyway, so my vision is good that way. But crossing all of that over, and my non-dominant eye pointing glove side, is always going to be a struggle tracking the puck to that side.
What's next?
Well, she said my exotropia is so severe that she's not sure vision therapy will fix it. I've adapted so much in my normal life that untraining that and training something new will be very difficult.
She did, however, give me some exercises to do to try and get my eye muscles behaving at least a little better. So I'll be working on those diligently (they give me an eyestrain headache a little bit, but I can deal with that if it helps in the long run) and hope they help out at least a bit.
Bottom line in my mind is that while this may be a limiting factor in some saves, there are certainly workarounds. Playing with good positioning--angle and depth and lateral movement--I can be a decent blocking goalie. Making good decisions with my stick, covering holes, staying square... all those things will stop a lot of pucks.
Having my glove out and forward, maybe not in the right place, but just OUT somewhere when I can see a shot is coming glove side, may be as good as it gets for me for that kind of save, until I learn to read the puck off the stick better and just get a feel for where the puck is going to go in relation to my glove.
Tracking a puck bouncing around in my crease is also hard, but still something that if I can stay mobile and stay square, I can deal with that.
So really, while I'm kinda jealous of all those goalies out there with normal binocular vision, I'm pretty happy to know what's going on and have a plan in place. I otherwise have terrific uncorrected vision for my age and healthy eyes, so I'm very thankful for that. So I let a few pucks in... it's not life or death and hey, it makes a skater happy, right?
Ahhh, okay, I can't even pretend that I like happy skaters. Suck it, skaters!
But still, it's all about perspective, right?
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Okay, worky time. Drop-in tonight, though my knee is finally starting to feel better, which kinda makes me wish I didn't have drop-in tonight so it could heal up for another few days. Oh well. Maybe there at least won't be an audience tonight. Last week, they'd just finished a public skate and the mall was open late for last minute shoppers, so we had quite a crowd watching us!
The only time it bothered me a little was when someone started banging on the glass behind my net. That was a first, and kind of a cool "pro moment" if you'll grant me that indulgence. But I recall thinking, "Wow, that is pretty distracting!"
So, you Aeros fans down behind the opposing net... bang away!
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