What It’s Like To Go Blind

For those that don’t know, I was recently diagnosed with some crazy illness that causes fluids to build up on my brain. The pressure is currently damaging my eyes and if it continues to build they say that I will die. I am not eligible for the treatment due to a drug allergy, so I began exercising, reduced sugar from my diet and I’m literally trying every natural cure that I can find.

But an update isn’t what you came for, you want to know what it’s actually like to lose your vision, so here goes...

The blurriness and migraines came around the same time and it was overnight, imagine one day everything seems fine except for a headache and then the next you can’t read anything. Then after a period of denial you finally pony up for a new pair of glasses and the blurriness is gone, but when you go outside, nothing seems right.

Everything is the same shade as if there is no contrast and without contrast it’s hard to find the boarders of any object and without borders, depth perception is a thing of the past. So everything looks flat, like a night-time backdrop in an old film, where people just pop into existence as they get closer.

Imagine staring down the street, but it takes maybe twenty seconds to understand that what your looking at is an outline of a car, then another twenty to realize that this car is in motion and by that time it is rushing past.

Mornings are the worst, because the pressure builds up while asleep and an intense pain has become my alarm clock. Then, when I open my eyes there is a period of blindness, were I’m feeling around the bedroom looking for the clock, only to remember that finding it is pointless.

The length of this period varies from day to day, maybe five to twenty minutes and I’m hoping to buy a hospital bed soon, so I can sleep at an angle, because I read that this can help.

Then when you go outside for a walk, the sun becomes an abusive asshole, absolutely blinding and blackening out every bit of detail to where everything is camouflaged in shades of black. People begin to appear out of nowhere, only to bump into you and you realize that it is better to walk with your head down, indicating to everyone that your not looking and it’s their responsibility to move out of the way.

As you continue down the side-walk the migraine only intensifies until your vision goes black and you get so dizzy that you have to stop and grab onto something out of fear of blacking out. When this happens I try to play it off as if I’m just a cool guy, casually leaning on someone’s house, because I don’t want to look like an easy target for muggers.

Sometime around the afternoon the migraine fades enough to where it’s possible to read or write a post, but after an hour or two it returns and intensifies until sleep is the only option.

Audio books are a must have!

Over the last year, I’ve listened to tons of books on writing and story telling and I am still learning new theories and techniques to eventually put into practice. I’ve always been a perpetual optimist and I can’t imagine living any other way.

Anyways, there’s a fight kicking off in the ghetto right now and someone in the street just aggressively yelled, “I’m woman too, wanna see!”

So, I have to go check this out...