Seeing the World Differently
One day, I began to see the world differently.
On February 20 I jumped into the swimming pool at our rented vacation house in California, opened my eyes underwater, and couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The rest of the afternoon, a cloud hovered over the center of my right eye. The letters blurred on the restaurant menu that evening. At a concert after dinner, the performers’ faces appeared as pink and brown featureless discs.
The following day when I drove to a store, I couldn’t read street signs. I seemed to view the world cross-eyed through a smear of lotion. Reading and writing were possible only if I blew up my iPad’s font size and rested my eyes after half an hour. Words sometimes appeared twice, and the page swallowed some letters. The word “lightbulb” looked like “lighghbulo.” I scheduled an ophthalmologist appointment for two days after our return to Michigan.
“You have wet age-related macular degeneration in both eyes,” the doctor said. She explained that wet AMD comes on suddenly and progresses swiftly. The specialist she referred me to saw me within days. The treatment sounds worse than it is: injections into the whites of the eyeballs that stop fluid leaking from rogue blood vessels into the retina. The injections don’t hurt; good thing, because I expect to have them for a long time.
I’ve bought magnifying tools that help me read and write. We’ve already enhanced the lighting in our house: the kitchen island is lit like an operating table. The first injections brought some improvement. I’m cheered by that, although I still don’t drive outside of our familiar local community or anywhere at night. The retina specialist believes the injections will not only stop the disease progression, but will improve the vision in my right eye. But I won’t fully regain what I’ve lost. Currently I’m bumbling around in 3.5-magnification Walgreen glasses, waiting for stabilization that will allow a proper prescription.
I’m normally pessimistic, so I can’t help but wonder why Glass-Half-Empty Mary isn’t lurking around every day. Here’s a delightful thing about seeing the world through my current eyes: Everyone looks pretty. I gazed at two of my women friends across a dinner table Sunday and thought, they’re younger looking than I remember. Every morning when I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I see an unwrinkled, poreless complexion and a halo of curls, my neck as supple as a teenager’s. I’m reminded of how cinematographers used to rub Vaseline on the camera lens to achieve a soft-focus aesthetic when filming Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich. Blurry is interesting when it comes to people. It’s less interesting, of course, when you’re trying to find the lowfat cottage cheese in a dimly lit refrigerator case at the Supervalu. But I see people more often than I seek cottage cheese.
Because I overlook things that are similar colors, I now have incentive to keep items in their proper places. Early on, I ordered a new swimsuit online because I thought I’d left my black one in California. Turned out it was sitting on our dark green granite hearth, and I couldn’t distinguish it. I’m proud of being neater. It’s about time.
As for writing and reading, I’ve made a game out of disappearing letters, trying to train my brain to supply them, giving myself mythical points for increasing my reading speed and building stamina at the computer screen. I do what experts suggest and shift my gaze away from the screen every fifteen minutes.
Glass-Half-Empty Mary whispers in my ear when I bean myself on a low branch hanging over the sidewalk; when I’m cutting oranges and can’t distinguish pith from fruit; when I ask for a ride home from chorus practice, knowing it’s inconvenient for the driver. I try to ignore her. It’s harder when she murmurs that she doesn’t know how much of my sight I’ll regain, or when she acknowledges that writing feels like it occurs on a tiny TV screen that I can’t keep clean, the blur and scratches clouding the clarity of my thoughts.
But now that I’ve seen the retina scans in preparation for the second injections, I have further reason to feel encouraged. The fluid under the retina in my right eye has been reduced by half, and there’s some reduction in the left eye, too. This means the injections are effective and I should have some positive results with my vision going forward.
Until then, I give myself permission to see-saw, to abandon an errand when I can’t read the addresses of buildings; to retreat to the bathroom when I enter a party with a large crowd whose faces are blurs of flesh; to take the path of least resistance and simply pretend to see what people want to show me on their iPhones. I call this “Mr. Magoo-ing.”
In front of my office window, two bald eagles swirl among the trees. Before my first injections, I could not have identified their white heads, though I might have Mr. Magooed a guess based on the way they coast and dive. Rediscovering bits and pieces of nature is a great way to mark my progress. The writer in me, however, is hoping my wayward retinas will be able to straighten out “lighghbulo” pretty damn soon.