On Being a Bit Blind

Unless you spend a bit of time around me and have heard me wittering on about it, and let’s face it I’m hardly the world’s most accomplished witterer, you probably aren’t aware that I have a blind spot in the center of my right eye. I acquired it abruptly about five years ago. I had just arrived at work one morning and noticed a large gray blob in my vision. I assumed I must have inadvertently stared at the halogen lights in the elevator, thought nothing more of it… and then called my eye doctor a couple of hours later because the blob was still there.

Long story short, I ended up seeing a retina specialist – not an optometrist or ophthalmologist, an actual surgeon – who diagnosed me with chorioretinitis. It’s an inflammation of the choroid layer of the retina, which can – and had, in my case – kill the rod and cone receptor cells in the layer above it which are what the eye uses to detect light. And unfortunately, those don’t regenerate.

Well, shit.

We’ll probably never know what caused it. I hadn’t had any illness I was aware of that might have been responsible. No eye trauma: hadn’t banged my head or been poked in the eyeball recently or anything like that. By the way, in case you were thinking it, this happened long before the other incident you may have heard about in which my one year old thought it would be splendid to carve a chunk out of Daddy’s cornea with her fingernail. That was fun. And it was the same eye. But the thing about corneas that isn’t true of retinas: they’re pretty damn good at healing.

On the bright side, although I am, technically, partially blind in that eye, I don’t usually notice much because my brain edits the blind spot out. I can only “see” it when I close my good eye. And that’s where things get spacy. Because they are dead cells and from my optic nerve’s perspective there’s nothing actually there, my occipital lobe has to be quite creative to try to make sense of it and so the blob seems to change shape and size on a frequent basis. Sometimes it bears an uncanny resemblance to Lord Voldemort. Sometimes it’s a jellyfish. Sometimes it’s like the adorable little doggy from one of my daughter’s puzzles. Today it looks a bit like a cartoon hammer, or one of those oil drilly things you see sharting up the countryside around Bakersfield.

Eye tests are also entertaining. The blob is not only right in my center vision but also distorts the light coming in immediately around it, so when they give me that thing that covers up the other eye and tell me to read off the numbers I always flunk that part magnificently. “There’s a 1, and a 3… no, wait, when I tilt my head a little bit it changes to a 9… hold on, now it’s turned into Bart Simpson from that rap video he was in.”

So it’s not all bad. Thus far, the blind spot hasn’t adversely affected my life, other than having to go back to the specialist for regular screenings and steroid shots in the eyeball to disabuse my retina of any ideas it might have about doing it again. Those are also fun. As long as I have functional access to the sense of sight, I can’t really complain. And I get to enjoy the wacky pareidolias my blob comes up with, including when my eyes are closed in the shower, which is what prompted me to write this. Aren’t you glad.