By Gretchen Keiser

In Scripture, one definition of faith is that a person sees with “new eyes.”

The phrase seems coined to describe the experience of Dorothy Skolnekovich, a longtime resident of the Atlanta archdiocese, who, in her early forties, is beginning a new life and seeing for the first time that which others have long taken for granted.

Until three years ago Ms. Skolnekovich’s “world” was a chaotic and changeable place. Objects that to those with normal vision seem stationary were moving and unpredictable in her field of vision. While walking, the sidewalk ahead might suddenly split into two sidewalks, criss-crossed and in motion. A person walking towards her might also “split” into a “house of mirrors” image of repeating figures, what she called a “wall of people.” Her reaction, not surprisingly, would be to freeze where she was and to raise her hands in front of her in defense against this approaching line. As she did so, the long person coming towards her on a nearly deserted sidewalk was likely to turn and give her a strange look.

With some variation in severity, this was the way her vision had been and the way her world had looked since she was a little girl, perhaps since birth. She knew no different and yet, with the will of a survivor, she had persisted in getting through high school, a technical school qualifying her as a licensed practical nurse and, eventually, on to college. She had learned to drive and supported herself in a variety of nursing jobs. She had been involved in helping people in many ways.

Despite those accomplishments, she carried the burden of a label received in childhood, that she was “mentally retarded” and that she “couldn’t learn.” The accomplishments of each day were fraught with the complications of using heightened senses of hearing and smell and taste – and to a large degree touch – to compensate for the extreme fluctuations in eyesight. Her sight affected the way the world looked and the way she acted and talked and behaved; to other people much that she said and did was disconcerting.

Letters and Numbers

The same visual condition which caused sidewalks and people to jump and double had made letters and numbers unpredictable since she was a child in first grade.

“Was” became “saw” and “cup” turned into “cub.” Similar letters like “d” and “b” could look identical sometimes. Spelling and reading were a nightmare which she recalls trying to circumvent by using hearing and memory.

Yet though she had had the vision problem for years and had been to doctors repeatedly, she had been told either that there was nothing that could be done or that it was all “in her head” and she was imagining her vision problems. Her condition was not correctly diagnosed and treated until she was 38 years old and sent, by a DeKalb Community College counselor, to see a Stone Mountain optometrist.

Through the care and concern of the optometrist, Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, and his staff that day proved to be the beginning of the healing that had eluded Dorothy for so many years.

She walked in the door in early January 1980 with four pages of handwritten description of her vision problems which the school counselor had asked her to write out. Over a brown bag lunch in the examination room at the rear of his offices, Dr. Gottlieb read the pages and reflected.

He saw a grown woman, very agitated and excited. The pages he read looked as if they had been written in several different handwritings. The spelling was “atrocious,” filled with reversals of many letters and phonetic spelling. He started asking questions like “Who wrote this?” “How many times did you sit down to write this?” and “Is this true?”

Privately, Dr. Gottlieb said later, he was recalling his parents’ admonition to listen well and “to have faith in people.”

To himself, he was thinking, “Try to believe that she’s telling you the truth.”

The First Problem

By the end of that day, after several hours of examination, he had “a problem or problems identified – or so I thought.”

Essentially he saw that Dorothy’s eyes did not work together, that one or both eyes turned, a condition called “strabismus.” Some 15 years earlier she had had eye surgery to try and correct the tendency of the eye to turn inward or outward. Surgery is commonly recommended by ophthalmologists, Dr. Gottlieb said, but he strongly believes that surgery alone is basically a cosmetic approach, treating the way the eyes look rather than the way the eyes and brain function together.

“What I saw was to notice that her eyes weren’t working together. I said, “You see two of me, don’t you?” I tried to assure her that what she was seeing was okay to see. I tried to be rather global in stating that seeing double affects your perception of everything. As your eyes separate, so does your world.”

For the first time Dorothy received bifocal glasses that corrected her vision at close range. It was the first time in her life she’d been reassured about her perception of the way things were.

In addition to fitting Dorothy with new glasses, Dr. Gottlieb recommended she begin a program of vision therapy, a program of treatment that teaches people how to use their eyes effectively. Through a variety of organized activities and visual challenges, therapy retrains eyesight so that the person sees the world as it is and learns to differentiate between spaces and objects.

Basically, optometrists who practice vision therapy have been proclaiming that vision is a learned process that builds from one state to another, just as a baby gradually learns through sight and also through the use of the whole body, where objects are, how far away they are and to “see” in a landscape where objects are in relations to one another.

For Dorothy this process had never taken place because the correct images had never been perceived in the first place. As far as she knew, the world was moving and unstable.

“She could never trust that something she saw at one moment would be the same at the next,” Dr. Gottlieb said.

“She had nothing to base her perceptions on. Everything was confused and not consistent.”

A Question of Faith

For Dorothy, one thing that had been consistent was her faith. As a teenager she had sought out religious instruction on her own, going to the door of a Pennsylvania Catholic church and asking about this man she’d heard about in school. “This man, whose name I couldn’t say, but the book said he changed peoples’ lives and I want to know if he can change my life because I needed a change.”

The priest who answered read to her, giving her religious education and she started going to daily Mass. Years later, when she was undergoing the stressful changes in her vision, she drew continual strength from the sacraments, going as often as possible to Mass and to confession to sustain her hope and to be restored.

The support of a prayer group, and of her friends at the Monastery in Conyers, were as critical as the visual therapy she began to receive, she said, “I couldn’t have made it without faith.”

Dr. Gottlieb, 33, had opened his practice in Stone Mountain seven years ago, after graduating from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry with a Doctor of Optometry degree in 1974. A Fellow of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development and of the American Academy of Optometry, he has seen vision therapy become increasingly well known and accepted. When he came to Georgia he was one of two doctors in the region specializing in vision therapy, but has been joined over the years by others and has seen the care recognized by the medical field.

Yet, despite his experience, in Dorothy’s case, because of her age and other complications, a commitment and mutual learning process unfolded which was highly unusual.

The degree of commitment emerged first in Dr. Gottlieb’s willingness to begin her program of vision therapy without knowing when or how he would be reimbursed. After nearly a year’s wait and a futile attempt to convince the state vocational rehabilitation program to cover the cost of her treatment, they started on vision therapy without certainty of financial support.

One of the first efforts was to train Dorothy’s eyes to work together to “fuse” the multiple images into one stable image. Like a young child, she began to see large objects and moving objects first. One day she came into the office and asked “if you could see bird’s wings in the air.” She has “seen” for the first time a bird in flight.

Perhaps the most challenging moment came when at the insistent question of a two-year-old child she was caring for, Dorothy tried to identify something that was “around her … always behind her.” The object sometimes was big and sometimes small, she said. Dr. Gottlieb, who knew that therapy had brought her vision to a stable state, feared that she was “psychotic.” He asked her to show him what she was talking about. It was the shadows of objects, including her own shadow, she’d never seen it before.

A notebook she was asked to keep describes in a poem her reaction to “a friend in the air” as she watched a squirrel picking its way along a utility line. As the therapy progressed, she was trained to pick out small objects and finer details.

The Second Revelation

A new level of commitment also emerged. As part of her college program at DeKalb, Dorothy needed an internship in a working environment. With her vision problems, her options were sorely limited and, to meet her need, Dr. Gottlieb agreed to let her work part time in his office. The closeness that developed led to a startling new discovery.

In June, struggling with final exams, Dorothy told Dr. Gottlieb that she had done poorly on an English test despite studying. She thought she had written over her own handwriting.

“I knew she had studied … I knew (her vision) was fused at that point … I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what had happened,” Dr. Gottlieb recalled. He reviewed the green exam paper. Line after line were written on top of each other. When he asked why she had written it that way he discovered she couldn’t read it back. He took out the green appointment forms she had been using in the office on a regular basis and asked how she filled them out. She had memorized where every question and space was on the complex form. “It never occurred to me that I was supposed to be able to read what I had written,” she said.

Dr. Gottlieb took the exam sheet and placed it on the brown office rug and asked her find it. She couldn’t. He tried it again in another room and again, to Dorothy’s eye, the paper vanished.

They had discovered that despite overwhelming odds against it, Dorothy was almost completely lacking in red-green color perception. “Less than one percent of women have color perception problems,” Dr. Gottlieb said, and he discovered in Dorothy the most severe red-green perception problem he had seen.

The world of objects that had emerged for her had been black and white. Now, with the use of a special red contact lens, and later a very light green lens in the other eye, she began to see in fullness, both the red and green objects she hadn’t seen before and the complete depth perception that the loss of color had affected. It was just before Christmas 1981 and she walked into Kroger’s and was horrified by the sight of what appeared to be grotesque skirts hanging from the ceiling – the season’s fabricated Christmas trees.

The difficult process of identifying began again. With the color lenses, therapists began to teach “visual closure,” the skill utilized in dot-to-dot pictures which complete a partial image and make it whole. In addition to teaching her to “control her eyes,” therapists also had “to teach her to trust her eyes,” Dr. Gottlieb said. After so many years of an unstable world, Dorothy had to learn that she could walk straight ahead without putting her hands out to ward off the unexpected. She had to learn that the world had stopped moving.

Conquering Fear

There was a final lesson, perhaps most difficult to conquer. For years, to fight off despair, Dorothy had told herself that she wasn’t “mentally retarded” but that when her vision was corrected she could learn. Suddenly with therapy and special lenses, she could see, but she lacked answers.

“Now I was seeing and I knew I was seeing, but I didn’t know what anything was,” she said.

It was difficult to express that suddenly alive fear about her own intelligence. Somehow, a sense of her own doubts emerged in a conversation with Dr. Gottlieb and he firmly pointed out that she could not understand all that had happened without normal intelligence.

“I had put myself under his care visually and he accepted that. When it came down to breaking my fears of being mentally retarded, when he really commanded me to stop thinking in those terms, it broke the power of it,” she said.

Armed with a camera and questions, she spent months taking pictures and bringing in objects to identify, including, “flowers in the air,” when the dogwood blossoms came out in the spring. It was her first understanding of leaves on trees.

Two years of vision therapy ended in December 1982. Christmas gifts – and birthday presents – exchanged between the office staff and Dorothy tend to be always red and green, just to keep her on her toes. Dr. Gottlieb is eager, six months later, to hear her grapple with describing the Stone Mountain laser light show. After graduation from DeKalb with an associate’s degree, she has enrolled this fall at the University of Steubenville, Ohio, seeking a bachelor’s degree in mental health with a minor in theology. She really would like to wind up with a doctorate degree. She has moved in the last year from practical nursing to teaching nurses’ aides.

Despite the completion of her therapy, she has left her mark on the office, Dr. Gottlieb says, acknowledging that “we were discovering as well as she was.”

For quite awhile “it was difficult to believe Dorothy had gone this far in her life without knowing what leaves of a tree were or a Christmas decoration … It was incredible,” he said.

Working with her “in a way changed our whole way of looking at people,” he said. “It gave us greater insights into the whole person. It was revealing. It was exciting.” Instead of thinking about a vision problem, they’ll be asking what it means to a person in their work and their play.

What they learned in treating Dorothy will likely help people who are children now – children who may come in for an exam and discover Dr. Gottlieb playing a game where they have to find the green paper he’s hidden on the floor.

Looking back, Dorothy sees the passage as one that required all the support she could draw from the community around her, the office, and her friends and from her faith – from daily Mass, from Communion and prayer.

“Even though it seemed impossible at times,” she said, “because of my relationship with the Lord I was able to keep going.”