My Irlen Exam

My Irlen examination was the day before yesterday. It went well. The purpose of the exam was to figure out which lenses were most comfortable for me, particularly outdoors since I suffer from migraines that seem to be triggered by sunlight. She started off the exam in a darkened room to help me relax.

The examiner gave me a series of lenses to look through, most of them colored. There were oranges, ambers, pinks, blues, greens, greys, and purples. She told me that I should choose the lenses I found the most calming. She also monitored my non-verbal reactions to help the process along. I could tell that she's very experienced with this sort of exam; she understands that clients' first reactions to the lenses are the most reliable, even as we deliberate over them.

I didn't much like any of the lenses at the beginning of the exam, and I was afraid that we wouldn't find anything to suit me. The examiner's astute observations, however, guided her towards combining lenses in a way that I found pleasing.

The first set of lenses I really liked were clear with a UV filter. To that she added grey lenses, on which I wasn't terribly keen at first, but then she somehow knew to put one grey lens atop a clear lens and the other grey lens beneath the clear lens, an arrangement she said was unusual. She had uncovered the window in the door and turned on the lights at this point. Then we decided that I'd like some kind of amber lens, but they all seemed to dark/shaded for me to choose.

We went outside in the bright sun as the second-to-last step. Things looked slightly distorted and I didn't know why. I thought maybe I'd simply need to acclimate to the lenses. Finally she combined the clear, grey, and amber lenses in a way I can't even remember. The distortion was still there, but it seemed to be caused by my looking through such a thick stack of lenses and not the colors of the lenses or their combination. She reassured me that thickness would not be an issue once the lenses were manufactured because the colors I'd chosen would be combined into one lens.

The final two tests were reading, both outdoors and indoors. The difference between staring at black text on a white page with the glasses and without them was dramatic. I definitely did the right thing, getting started on this path with Irlen lenses. Whether the lenses help with my migraines or not, I definitely have Irlen Syndrome.

It's truly a pity that this isn't medically recognized. My health insurance should be paying for this. I could have avoided borrowing money for the cab I had to take to get to the Bay Area early enough for my appointment. My health insurance offers transportation to medical appointments, but the exam didn't qualify for that.

To make sure that my eyes have as much protection as possible, I decided to get some wraparound eyeglass frames. As soon as I get those, I will mail them to the examiner and the process of making my glasses will commence.

The rest of the day went better than I'd feared it would. Even though I'd forgotten my sunglasses (which help delay migraines) in the rush out the door to meet my taxi (he showed up rather early), my head hurt significantly less, rather than more, than it normally would. I did make an effort to avoid looking out the window during the two-hour bus ride I had after my taxi ride, but I looked out the window during the whole hour-long train ride after that and it did not noticeably worsen my headache.

The taxi cost only thirty bucks (I'd borrowed fifty). I came across Whole Foods (a familiar grocery store that sells a lot of inexpensive vegan items) on my walk from the bus stop to the train station and was able to get a snack and relieve my overly full bladder there without risking missing my train. I got caffeinated protein bar, and the caffeine probably helped with my headache. The exam was over early enough that I was able to take public transportation home (rather than getting stranded out of town like the last time I'd traveled far). In fact, we were done sooner than the exams usually run, she said.