Blog vol 3. 23. Pirates and patches.
Favourite Halloween costumes: witches, ghosts, cats, Batman, pirates. Pirates complete with a red bandana, a stuffed parrot on the shoulder, a wooden leg, a tattoo or two, an eye patch…
There it is, the eye connection.
One gets thinking that there were a lot of eye accidents in the pirate population. Kids taking classes in cannonry and swashbuckling would have to watch those flying projectiles. As the instructors invariably would say, “It’s always fun until someone loses an eye.”
But, and this is very ingenious…
Scientists studying the brain and the retina have concluded that the patch had a practical purpose, and was not worn because of injury or just for a fashion statement.
The life of a pirate and even an able seaman involves going from on top of the deck to underneath it, from blinding daylight to a dark hold. This requires time to adjust, up to 10- 30 minutes depending on your age and your daily intake of carrots. A very clever buccaneer found that if he patched his eye on top, he would be able to keep on seeing down below by removing the patch over the unbleached eye. (Read more
here).
This use of patching could mean the difference between a successful raid or capture and death. One thing for certain, to pillage and survive, pirates will take every advantage they can get. A note to the developers of the video game, ”Sea of Thieves,” definitely add this realistic component, of patching and unpatching, to the day-to-day lives of the sailors.
In my days in the military reserve, Algonquins, B Company, we learned about night warfare. The military uses para-flares that are launched to light up an area, but quickly fade out and drop to the ground. During training, we were always told to close one eye and keep it closed as soon as the flare went up so that when the light died down you could continue to see with the unbleached eye. Again, potentially a matter of life and death, and by the way, it does work.
The rods in the retina are receptors that receive light which starts a chemical reaction in the retinal. Problem is that this reaction takes time to recover, getting bleached out. When you get into dark conditions you rely on these rods a lot more but it takes time to shift to the darker environment. If you are deficient in Vitamin A or you are older, that shift takes longer.
As optometrists, we use patches when we want to encourage a “lazy” eye to develop, we will patch the good eye to make the “lazy” eye work. A few hours a day at home with a patch and some sessions with Minecraft with a patch and we get great results.
You know the favourite letter of a pirate on the eye chart, right?
“RRRRRRRRRR”
til next week,
the good doctor
