“I feel like I’m staring at a very tall ceiling in the dark and I can’t see the end,” the old lady said.
She became blind, literally overnight. Things had been dimming slightly over a week, then one morning she opened her eyes and the shade never went up.
I sat by my 80 year old patient as she described her experience.
“There’s no light,” she reached her hand as if trying to grab it.
The sunlight behind me lit her prismatic features. The tip of her nose and cheeks were red-stained from wandering capillaries. Skin and wrinkles bathed in golden light like skipping sand dunes.
“No shadow….”
The light blue and green veins ran down her scalp like a river on a map. Large clouds of white hair sat above. Steel-blue eyes looked upward as the sun transected her irises.
“It’s like a dungeon,” she continued.
Sometimes she did see something,
“I saw a little star yesterday I think. And before that maybe some grey cloudy mountains. Not today.”
Those visions are called Visual Release Hallucinations (or Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome). The recently blind or sensory deprived tend to get them. Those born without sight do not.
Could these be what the blind seers of tales past are seeing? Their occipital lobes become so desperate for the accustomed visual stimulation that they create their own?
As I contemplated how much this must suck, I made a mental note to make sure I didn’t say my usual ”See you later.” Silly, but who knows what is or isn’t silly when you’ve been blind for the first five days of the rest of your life. I took her hand from the darkness and said my goodbyes.
-
Later, an older Chinese nurse asked if I’d gotten the eye surgery.
“Me? No way. No,” I answered abruptly, “I’m just wearing my contacts more.”
“Oh, have you thought about getting it done?”
“No, thanks. I don’t want to risk the side effects – seeing halos, poor close vision or night vision.”
“I’ve had some friends who got it done, and it’s worked for them.”
“Yeah, my wife got Lasik. It’s great for her,” I got up to see another patient and smiled, “Even if it’s a 1 in 10,000 chance of a bad outcome, that’s too much.”
Too much unseen.
