Unwanted Sandstorm

Good Morning Friends. I am going to write this post in what I hope is the least “poor pitiful me” manner I can muster but I am still pretty freaked out. I’ve said that this blog is part therapy for me, and honestly… this is one of those blog posts that I do not plan to syndicate widely as a result. There are a lot of disabilities that I think I could figure out how to work around and still do the things that I love. The two that freak me out the most however are the loss of my sight and the loss of my mental capacity. I also have a hefty fear of not being able to breathe but that comes from growing up severely asthmatic and having so many moments in my life where I could not catch my breath. If you listened to this weekend’s podcast, and I seemed out of sorts at all… I was pushing through a pretty major panic attack to record it.

A few hours before we started recording I was upstairs playing Guild Wars 2 and I kept trying to brush what I thought was a thread caught on my glasses out of the way of my vision. I was in the Inner Nayos zone and there was already a lot of black crap blowing around in the air so at first I thought it was just a visual. However, no amount of cleaning my glasses seemed to remove whatever this visual obstruction was. I went downstairs to stare uselessly into my eye in the bathroom mirror because I thought maybe it was a stray lash… when all shit went wrong. It felt like I was looking out through the world in a sandstorm and there were all of these individually distinct black dots appearing all over my vision and swimming around. To some extent, it felt like I was looking out through one of those clear bottles of gel-based hand sanitizer that had all of the suspended air bubbles.

It was around this point that the world started spinning as I went into a full-blown panic attack. My mind was racing… “What do I need to do before I completely lose my vision”. This seems like an irrational thought pattern, but there is some additional history that you need to understand in order to make sense of that. My family has a medical history of having their retina detached, and I have always been paranoid about it. My grandmother(dad’s side) had hers detach when I was in high school, my dad had his detach when I was in college, and my aunt (dad’s sister) had hers detach at some point during my early career bound adulthood. I feel like I have been waiting for this shoe to drop for quite a long time, which admittedly colored my opinions.

To be fair this line of thinking is not one that is entirely new for me. During my Junior year of High School, I had this sinus surgery that was working up against the brain case. While prepping for the surgery they had prepared us for all of the worst-case scenarios like a tool slipping and cracking something and causing a leak of fluid that could lead to brain damage and the like. So it was in this fertile ground for terror and paranoia… that I started having an allergic reaction to the specific combination of anesthesia and reagent used to wake me up. It was delayed by a few hours… but I started to have stroke-like symptoms as I lost control of the left side of my face and my eye started pulling up into the corner. I remember having a very similar thought “What do I need to say while I still have my mental facilities, because I am going to lose myself”.

Zoom forward to Saturday night… I am trying to keep my shit together and record a podcast. However, as I am back upstairs trying to calm down and be personable a new problem starts to occur. When I move my eyes to shift focus between my two monitors there is this flashbang off the left side of my face. It sort of looked similar to the eyelash thing from earlier but bright white and disorienting. I got through the show but I fumbled the intro as I tried to stop looking at the monitor and missed Thalen’s name from the list I read down every week. It’s really hard to keep your shit together when there is a rave happening in your eyeball. While this was going on my wife was searching for any possible ophthalmological emergency services in the area but came up empty. She specifically checked our local emergency room… which is still dealing with the after-effects of a ransomware attack… and largely came up empty.

As soon as we wrapped the recording I logged out and went to bed, trying to calm the fuck down and sleep was harder than I would have expected. I was concerned about medicating myself to sleep with melatonin or something of the sort because I was not sure how it would interact with whatever the hell was going on with my body. I probably got around half of a night’s sleep but by morning things were more manageable. Now I am basically in a state where I have way more pronounced “floaters” but they have largely coalesced into a dark ink spot that appears floating around in the lower right corner of my vision and a black thread made up of individual dark pinpoints that appears in the upper left edge of the field of vision. There is also what I can on describe as a ” piece of cotton on my eyelashes” that occasionally appears which mostly just makes me feel like constantly cleaning my glasses or rubbing my eye to remove debris.

The positive is that whatever is happening seems to be limited to my left eye, which is ultimately the weaker of the two. I’ve needed a new prescription for a while and my doctor’s office opens at 8 am this morning I intend to beg and plead for them to see me quickly. The other positive is that things seem to have normalized a bit and I have not had any more of the “flash bangs” since Saturday night. I am not sure what happened to cause so many more floaters to appear in my vision but hopefully, we can get to the bottom of it today. The other thing that gives me a bit of hope is that so far nothing that I am experiencing is anything like either my dad, aunt, or grandmother described. They all talked about a curtain closing off their vision starting from one side and going to the other. Right now I just have way more floaters than my brain can cancel out. I think I could eventually get used to this albeit it will never stop being annoying.

Nothing really new happened when this all occurred. I was not exerting myself or being exposed to some new stimulus. I was sitting upstairs playing video games like I have done for large swaths of my adult life. I was not playing through a segment that involved flashing lights or anything like that. I can only assume this is a physical thing and not neurological because it does not seem to be impacting my right eye in the least. Anyways… I think partially I am writing this all out in case something happens to me or things proceed much worse… there will be a written record of what happened before I disappear. Like I don’t mean that to sound as ominous as I am sure it does, but I have no clue what the next few days will hold for me. I know my dad had to deal with this nitrogen bubble in his eye that was attempting to hold the retina back in place until it healed enough to reattach on its own.

Anyway I mostly threw in non-sequitur images just to have something to break up the giant block of text. For those unable to follow my train of thought the last one is Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes from the 90s musical act TLC. I didn’t want to put a photo of an eyeball in this post because honestly… they are kind of gross to look at. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you all have a wonderful week and I hope I either get a clean bill of health and have to just learn to live with this nonsense or some sort of medical intervention to stop things from getting worse. Until this is resolved I am probably going to be in a more volatile than normal state, and I am pre-emptively sorry if I do anything odd.