When one goes without sensory stimulation for a long period of time and then the deprived sense is stimulated, it is very overwhelming–I have talked about this in previous notes a bit. When I have read things that doctors and psychologists have written about people who have had their sight restored, some of them indicate that the people eventually went back to functioning as if they were blind. Of course, none of these things included any personal perspective from the person who was treated, and when I had my retinal surgery in 1998 after nine months without much sight, I looked for personal memoirs written by people who had undergone sight restoration procedures (e.g. surgeries in adulthood for congenital cataracts, corneal transplants after long-lasting blindness, etc.) There are not many such writings; and those that exist emphasize the wonder of seeing faces, etc.
I certainly experienced wonder (both then and now). I don’t want to diminish that at all. But I also think it is important to document the part of the experience that makes this challenging to cope with. Challenging is different from negative. Mom says, “No pain, no gain.” In this case, she is literally right.
I have a friend whom I have come to know personally because of discussions about sight restoration… She emailed me in 2003 after reading articles on my web site shortly after having her cornea transplant. She had lost a good deal of her sight in adulthood and was classified legally blind for four years. She did not receive rehabilitation to help her adjust to life without her vision; and when she received her sight back, she had as much difficulty coping with it as she did with her loss earlier. She often patched her eye in order to return to the world that had become comfortable; and over the last few years we have spent much time talking over how to ease into living with her sight and integrate the information she receives from all of her senses.
I have thought of my friend several times over the last couple of weeks as I have patched my own eye in order to get away from the bright light and excruciating pain. The patch sometimes helpe; but sometimes my eye squeezes itself shut so tightly that I think it might burst, even waking me up in th emiddle of the night because I am dreaming about bright light. As I write this, I think of people who ask me whether blind people dream in color… The answer is that everybody dreams in whatever images their brain is able to create, whether from present knowledge or from memory. My current dreams are quite vivid and painful.
Today, on the way home from Detroit, the sun shown in the passenger window as we drove south. I shut my eyes, but it didn’t help. My dad handed me my mom’s wrap-around sunglasses, and we wondered whether they would fit over my extremely thick glasses. They did… And the pain went away!
I will be wearing wrap-arounds for a while, until my eye gets used to some level of stimulation. Perhaps even at night. Yeah “I wear my sunglasses at night.” In a couple of weeks, I’ll try taking them off for a little while.
Word to the wise (Why do we say that when wise people would not do stupid things?): Do not put your glasses where they can be sat upon. You will be the one who sits upon them, and the earpieces will be irreparably damaged. (If you are wise, you know what that means.)
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