Accepting Your Eye

The First Step

Psychologically, losing an eye can affect the way people perceive themselves.

Acceptance takes time. Just how much time depends on so many things.

Handle Your Eye
There’s no “quick fix” to getting through the grieving process. But there’s one small thing that does help in accepting an artificial eye.

It’s all about being comfortable with handling an artificial eye.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Some adults who lost an eye as a child have never actually removed and replaced their eyes for cleaning, because one of their parents always did it. Others fear even touching their eye prosthesis.

We are all taught from a young age not to touch our eyes which can create a big barrier to dealing with that part of the body.

We’ve seen first-hand how taking control and handling the prosthesis has made a huge difference to some of our clients.

One eighty-year-old lady who’d just received her first artificial eye was terrified about removing it, in case she couldn’t get it back in. But with the support of her daughter, she managed it. She immediately felt calmer and in control.

Another client reported the same feelings of calmness and control when we helped her handle her own eye. She’d lost her eye as a child and her mother had always looked after it. She never realised how easy it was to look after.

Anyone facing a major health crisis is more equipped to deal with it by taking as much control as possible over their situation. For artificial eye wearers, becoming confident with handling the eye early on, assists greatly with acceptance. The artificial eye then becomes just another body part, not something foreign to be feared.

If we get a chance, we visit people in hospital before they have an eye removed. We take along an artificial eye for them to see and handle.

Accepting an artificial eye is easy for some, and really challenging for others. If you’re struggling with handling your own eye, your ocularist can help you gain control.

The one thing people say when they’ve mastered their artificial eye is, “wow, that was easy”.

The Acceptance Journey

There are people who wear artificial eyes their whole life and no one ever notices.

In other circumstances you might meet someone and their eye is the first thing you notice. One would be tempted to think that the quality of the eye is making the difference.

Maybe the eye needs a clean or an adjustment. Possibly in some cases these factors may be true. What is less obvious is the role that personality plays in how obvious an artificial eye is.

A person who is self conscious will often have a more obvious eye than someone who is feeling good in themselves.

Someone who believes the eye prosthesis is obvious can become preoccupied with its appearance. Someone who is still freshly grieving for their lost eye may have a more obvious artificial eye than someone who has worn an artificial eye all their lives.

This has a lot to do with acceptance. Subtle factors such as posture, voice, style of movement all tell a story and we humans are pretty good at reading those stories in each other.

There is a time for grieving and feeling angry. This grieving may be a journey over several years. This is all pretty normal and healthy.

It seems that people who face set backs with a positive attitude do better than people who get stuck in this grief or negative thinking. Many people struggle for years from the loss of an eye.

It is as painful ten years after the event as it was in the beginning. It is as if the eye has not settled into the person. For these folk it is very difficult to get to the point of acceptance.

For some people it involves a lot of talking. For some others it is a decision they make one morning.  Some people find they have needed a professional pychologist to help. Each of us has our own way of working things out.

It is incredibly hard for an ocularist to make an eye look good when a person feels sad inside.

While a person is feeling numb or depressed about their experience it is nearly impossible for an ocularist to capture that “life” and paint it into an eye.

It can help to relax and chat with your ocularist as they make your eye.  As you chat about things you love your face comes to life and a sense of your spirit captured and recreated in your new prosthesis.

Talking and being heard can help in the healing the spirit.  The more you are able to accept your new circumstance and your new eye the less it defined who you are to yourself or others.

Where do you think you are up to in this process of acceptance of eye loss?