'I can only see things right in front of me'
By Simon Barget
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I woke up this morning and found I could hardly see. I mean I could only see what was right in front of me, my mirror, my hands, the carpet just below me, but everything else just wasn’t there. It wasn’t a matter of being out of focus, nothing to do with the eyes momentarily adjusting to the light, with the fact of being suddenly awake, with long- or short-sightedness, there was no dizziness or colours, no nausea, of course I checked my eyes to see if something had got wedged in, although I just knew there was nothing there, because I could feel, it, I checked notwithstanding this knowledge, I went and stood in front of the mirror and I had a good look. I knew there was nothing remotely near, in, or anywhere around the eye. But I figured this was something I needed to satisfy myself I’d done, especially if I was going to call at the doctor’s surgery later. Obviously the first thing they’d ask me was if I’d put anything inside accidentally or on purpose, I certainly didn’t want to appear certain, for him then to retrieve something from the eye with one of those awkward instruments I’m not completely familiar with, with the sleight of hand of a magician or even just with a forefinger and a dab of water or saline. I do wear contact lenses but I can feel when the lenses have been dislodged, and this just hadn’t happened.
What this thing feels like is as if someone has removed 90% of the view. I am not blind, the vision is still crystal clear, I see everything with exactly the same clarity, the same sharpness, the same hue. But it feels like I can only see things right in front of me. I keep saying the same thing to everyone, but I don’t know how else to explain it. For example, I was just walking along the street back from the doctor, and I could only see a few steps in front of me, I couldn’t see the cars in the road, or the traffic lights up ahead, I certainly couldn’t make out the houses on the other side of the road, or anyone on that side of the pavement for that matter. I felt like I had no idea what was happening anymore. I felt very stupid and dense. I felt like I could no longer think about what was going to happen in the following few seconds, I couldn’t plan, I couldn’t, for example, prepare to move out of the way of an oncoming pedestrian, because I’d only see them at the last minute, I felt like I suddenly had no idea how the world worked anymore, I couldn’t predict just that little bit ahead in the future like I’d previously been used to.
I wouldn’t have known the difference before I woke up this morning. I mean I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong without having known what it was like to see everything like I’d done yesterday and all my life up to now. It would have appeared completely normal. I wouldn’t have said anything about it, I wouldn’t have complained or sought advice. I wouldn’t have asked people if they’d had the same thing going on, I would never have mentioned it. This thing that’s suddenly afflicted me isn’t painful or bad, it isn’t uncomfortable or debilitating. This isn’t a prequel to blindness, like cataracts or something, nothing like that, I can still see perfectly but only things right in front of me. The one thing I can say about it is, that it’s different, different to yesterday and the rest of my life.
Of course sitting around yesterday, I’d never have thought I’d be in the position I’m in now. It doesn’t enter your mind. Why would it? You have no premonition. There’s nothing in your world to suggest it, there’s no pre-cursor, no warning system, there’s nothing online about this whatsoever by the way, I’ve googled everything you can google, it’s a complete mystery, not a single person in the world appears to have experienced it, and I made my google search as precise as I could using inverted commas and + signs, putting the words in varying orders, I tried different search engines, I was even thinking of trying the dark web, but I found nothing. It’s just interesting to me to cast my mind back to yesterday, to a day when I wasn’t like this and everything was normal, so-to-speak. It feels weird to be even saying this.
After a few hours of poking and manipulating without success, I managed to get an appointment with the doctor. She saw me almost immediately. Like I said, I’d come prepared. I didn’t want to be shown up, I didn’t want to appear like a time-waster or even worse a inventor of maladies. On the way there, I realised that she might well send me to an optician, or an ophthalmologist or even a neurologist, she might well say that this isn’t really the type of thing a doctor treats. She might tell me that this is purely a matter of sight correction, nothing to do with health, you don’t go to the doctor to get glasses, you go to Boots. She was going to make me look stupid.
All of those things were long forgotten though when I was actually in her little consulting room. She was quite earnest to begin with. What she wanted to make sure of, of course, was that there was no brain injury or concussion, so she asked me if I had played sports, had I hit my head against something, all fairly obvious questions to which the temptation to respond ‘yes’ was hard to resist. I knew that the truth would be a let-down, it would bring out the blanket and token doctor-dismissal, the option to be referred to someone if I wanted it, to but not much after that.
But I just wanted so much to convey to this doctor, in the limited time we had, what it felt like to be able to see only those things right in front of you and nothing more. I felt that I needed to dissect exactly what it was to be like this, and after dissecting, report and convey, and I felt that if I could achieve this, then she would take me seriously, she would at least be able to imagine what it was like to be looking through my eyes in that very moment, whereas what was immediately clear was that she had little interest in understanding me or the condition. I tried so hard to be precise, to choose my words carefully, I made such an effort, was she noticing? I tried above all to be scrupulously honest about what it was, even if the ramifications were a judgment about my psychology, I tried my very best not to play it up to even the slightest degree. I went to great lengths to explain that it wasn’t a matter of an exact distance beyond which I couldn’t see, since she became hung up on the idea that it was a matter of the background being blurred out beyond a certain point or things just vanished. I insisted that it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t that simple, it was more that I had no idea what I was looking at unless it was really close, it wasn’t that I couldn’t see it, because I could, it was more a matter of perception. But I didn’t want to mention perception. Saying the word was a terrible mistake. As soon as I did she kept coming back to the brain and I knew it had nothing to do with my brain, but now I’d thrown her a bone, and by then I was half willing to go with it and let her send me to a neurologist.
She made me feel stupid, which was exactly what I feared was going to happen. I knew there’d be no point going. When I started talking about no longer being able to predict things as they arose, she completely glazed over, she almost burst out laughing. I mean what level of professionalism does that show? What sort of doctor does that? I shouldn’t have wasted my breath.
So I’m faced with the question of whether I want to do something about this thing or not, and if so, how. Do I want to go and read letters off an optician’s letter board? Do I want to go through the whole process again with a neurologist? Do I want to have to give a perfect account of myself only to find my interlocutor not listening, or pretending to listen but not, or interrupting, or if not interrupting, letting me speak for the good five minutes that it takes to give my account -- at least it did at the doctor earlier today -- to describe what exactly is going on with my eyes, to be met with some sort of sullen dismissal? Do I want to see someone’s eyes glaze over? Why would I put myself through that again?
And then, since my sight is not really causing me any difficulty, and that’s a question they will ask, and the doctor did ask, how can I justify seeking them out, what can I claim is my reason for seeing them? The question is valid and had/has gone through my mind. And the answer is complex. I stammered when the doctor asked. I couldn’t give a correct account of myself. Whereas my description of the condition had been top-notch I felt, my response as to what I hoped to achieve from treatment was mumbled and mute. I was thinking a lot but not saying much. I can say what was going through my mind whilst I was foundering. I can say that I was thinking things like I wanted to be understood, and yes, that’s part of it, I do certainly want to be understood, but don’t I have a right to be? Do you have to be suffering incomprehensibly do be able to justify the need to be understood? Would I have to take my eyes in on a platter, engorged in blood and goo in order to claim some smidgeon of relief? I had had a pre-sentiment, even as I woke up that morning, as I became conscious of the change, that no one was going to care one bit or the other. Unless I had a legitimate claim to pain, it would be going through the motions.
But it wasn’t just understanding I’d been craving. One other thing that went through my mind as I sat in that little room was that maybe this was something the doctors needed to know about, some fringe condition, something starting to affect mankind, that there might be a handful of sufferers in the world of which I was one, that I had been blessed to have been chosen, to raise awareness, at least in my meaningless little part of the world, and that then slowly slowly the dots would be connected and the answer found. I would be the key to some great cure the doctors and scientists had been quietly working on. With my help, they could solve this. Yes, I admit I got a fair bit carried away with this notion, but it wasn’t ridiculous, at least it didn’t seem so in the face of my fruitless google results in the morning
And then, what else was going through my mind as I froze in the face of the question, was that I just wanted to tell someone, I wanted to communicate, communicate for the sake of it, not for any particular purpose, I wanted to be heard amidst the act of communication, and if the doctor had merely said ‘Ok, thank you’ in lieu of some long and forced speech about what it might be and how to approach it and ‘let’s book an appointment for next week’ or ‘do keep me informed’, if the doctor had just shown by some simple words, or even absence of them that she had been listening, I would have been good. I’d have been fulfilled and satisfied.
None of these things did I end up saying in the moments that they all careened through my mind. I just sat looking confused and letting them knock about and against each other for a while. It can only have been a matter of a few seconds, but of course it felt much longer.
I am at home now. Sometimes you feel these things will go away, self-correct, and you will again feel like the doctor has been vindicated. But my sight is the same. I can only make sense of the objects right in front of me. I feel I have no foresight any more. Everything is different. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m completely caught in the moment. There is no longer a future. Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life like this, in this new way? The longer it goes on, the more certain I am that it’s not going to reverse itself. Every second that goes by increases my certainty. If it hasn’t corrected now, why would it correct later? What could change or influence it such that it would? And I thought about banging my head against a wall, I have immersed it in water for almost a minute, I poured oil into my ears, I tried to stop breathing, I tried yoga and headstands, but nothing has had any effect. The longer it goes on, the more likely it’ll stay.
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faced with a disbelieving
faced with a disbelieving bureaucracy, what can you say or do?
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