Eye Caramba!

Hey guys,

Sorry for my abrupt absence these past couple of weeks, but something happened that I ought to tell you about.

Around the time of my woodpecker post, I had an experience during one of my crises where I suddenly felt like I couldn't see. It was like I had been looking at an incandescent light bulb for too long, and was suffering the effects of flash blindness - that aftermath where the bulb imprint remains in your eyes impairing your vision. It was very weird...

Anyway, it didn't take long before that effect vanished. But throughout the week afterwards I continued to feel like my eyesight was "strange". As I told the doctors the following Sunday, I felt like "I could see, but I couldn't". Objectively, I knew that I was seeing everything wherever I looked... but somehow, I continued to have the nagging feeling that "something was missing".

It was in the process of discussing this nagging feeling with a friend, that we solved the riddle! My left eye was seeing perfectly, but my right eye had only partial vision (a little more than peripheral, a lot less than complete). With both eyes open, the left compensated for the right, but with only the right open, there were obvious blind spots to my sight.

Blind spots which were not big enough to greatly impair general looking & noticing, but still significant enough to impact finer eye activities like reading. So I rushed to the E.R where I was eventually admitted and soon diagnosed with a "retinal occlusion". Meaning that a blood vessels in my eye had been or were still blocked by a blood clot.

The next 2 weeks were spent on all sorts of medical tests. I had gotten a transfusion, so we needed to make sure I took it well; I needed to have a full eye exam, to find out how much damage there was, and determine what, if anything, the doctors could do... and so on and so forth. I still have another doctors appointment in a few days to get a full physical.

Anyway, that combined with some other more exciting life activities (like working on publishing my next book and applying for my masters! 🙂 ), sort of took me off writing for a while. But now I think I'm starting to feel inspired again. 😀

As for my eye, the doctors say that the blockage is gone and my eye looks normal, but the damage has already been done and there's nothing they can do. They believe I'll get used to it, and these days, I don't even notice it unless I'm trying to read exclusively with my right eye.

So I guess I've now got that cyclops vision... 😆 All I need is the outfit, the red visors, and some laser-beams shooting out of my eyes.