Fruits of Insanity

the awesome miracle of sight

I'm not blind. Not really in any clinical sense, although without my glasses, I can see maybe a short way in front of me before sight fades into a blur of incomprehensible shapes that I can define out of habit and inference without grasping any detail or expression. When I was about ten, my mother asked the eye doctor, “Just how bad are her eyes,” and was told, “She can see six feet in front of her.” That has shortened over time, although my glasses still correct me to perfection.

At my last appointment with the ophthalmologist, before having my eyes dilated, (because shining bright lights into the eye until the remnants of them cut a fading green line through the center of my vision is something they try to do to me regularly on the theory that I have diabetes, and that causes blindness and they want to test me every year so that if any changes are detected they can scare me enough to hopefully get my blood sugar back in order) they decided that I need reading glasses. In other words, I'm at that point which comes in most people's life where the eyes are old enough to need bifocals.

I find that somewhat lowering.

I've been wandering around ever since with a prescription in my purse, trying to convince myself to fill it. It's been months. I do need to. I'm starting to get headaches with the lack of bifocalness in my life.

But still, I see well enough.

I'm not like my sister. Rachel is an interesting case in that she never had to have glasses growing up. No, she has always had perfect vision. She's four years younger than me, so she probably doesn't even need reading glasses, yet. But a few years ago, she had a major health scare, her retina detached, and now she's blind in one eye.

That's an interesting story, of course. When Rachel tells the story I don't know where she starts, but to my mind it started one Christmas about nine or ten years ago when she came up to visit. She didn't bring her husband, so it was just her and the three kids she had at the time (Charles wasn't born yet, and he's nearly eight. The twins are four and they weren't even a glimmer on the horizon) visiting grandma's house with a a cold.

More than a cold. She had a sinus infection. It wasn't that bad when she got here, but it got worse, enough that Dad and all of us tried to convince her to go to the doctor. But because of various things: It's just a cold, a virus, what are they going to do about it? We're changing insurance next year. I can't afford to go to the doctor here when I can go when I get back home on the new plan. It's not that bad.

By the time she was ready to take her kids and go home, two weeks later, she had significant pressure on her sinuses and she was feeling poorly enough that we seriously considered driving her and her car to the halfway point, meeting her in-laws for them to drive her the rest of the way home—but she convinced everyone that she was fine. She could drive. She made it home. She even made it to the doctor's the next day, when her eye had swollen shut.

They sent her home with antibiotics, which was probably not the right thing to do, because it got worse, and because she was on a course of antibiotics, she didn't think she needed to go back to the doctor when all they would tell her was more of the same, and so when her eye finally opened again a week later and she realized that she couldn't see . . . it was too late to save her vision.

Sinus pressure had built behind her eye, detaching her retina and permanently giving her monocular vision. She needed her sinus cavity drained. They discovered in the process that it had a bony growth in the sinus cavity that made it harder to drain on its own. The sinus cavity was putting pressure on her brain. She needed brain surgery. She now has a scar behind her hairline that involved lots of headbands while healing. She needed intravenous antibiotics after she came home. She needed a home health nurse every day.

During the ordeal, I came down and watched the kids, and then while she was in the hospital with the worst of it (including a bleed that nearly killed her) we took the kids back to grandma's for a few weeks and then I went down again to watch them after she got home again. All in all, it was nine weeks of confusion and bad tempered Rachel—she hates hospitals.

So, what does monocular vision mean? Not much. She can still drive. She can still home school her children. She has the ability to blink her blind eye and it moves naturally, although it is a little off. When she pours milk for her children, she sometimes misses because she doesn't have depth perception. If someone approaches her or tries to get her attention from her left, she won't necessarily see it immediately. She has to turn her head all the way around to check for vehicles approaching from behind. Her good eye still has perfect vision. It's a difficulty but not a disability if that makes sense.

When the eclipse happened, she took one of her boys and drove out to view it in totality. On the way back, she saw a rainbow. Her world is full of sight, still.

But it is a cautionary tale for us all, now. Just because it's just a cold doesn't mean we don't take care of it. There's no such thing as a simple stuffy head. Don't wait. Don't take chances with health

I think, though, that it's difficult to really appreciate sight as the miracle that it is without considering how fragile it is.

I remember the time when I was about ten, going out of the shop with my first pair of glasses, with the floor falling away from me a bit the way it always does with a new prescription. And I looked and I saw a tree. And I realized, as though for the first time, that there were individual leaves on that tree which I could see from more than six feet away.

And that was amazing.

Word count: 1092
Prompt 1: Visually Impaired People Day (6/6)