Monday, April 07, 2008
This was what I woke up to this morning. Took this off of my bedroom balcony. Pretty eh? Thought I'd treat you to a Sunday pix since I didn't get one in yesterday.
Been on the phone all day with doctors. Yeah. It's a big deal. Acute vision loss. It's worse today. So, Betsy is going to drive me into UT tomorrow so they can see me and figure out why I'm going blind in that eye. The good news and what makes me feel better is that the MRI was negative back in December. That was after an episode like this but not quite as bad. So, they don't think I have a clot back there.
I've been thinking a lot about what I would do if I lost my vision. I mean, if this happened in both my eyes I wouldn't be able to see at all. I wonder if I would be able to write. Writing is such a visual thing--and I've always been such a visual person. It's how I learn things. I don't only write to write stories, but there is something about the arrangement of words on a page that is beyond just the craft. It's a visual-design thing. There are nuances on the page of how certain punctuation looks. Like, emdashes look muscular and semicolons are much more feminine--it's about how they look as much as what they do. How will I function if I can't see that?
I didn't really understand what was happening until I looked at a printed page. The letters look like they've been typed with an overused typewriter ribbon (for those of you too young to know what this looks like--a laser printer that has run out of toner will do the same thing). How ironic is that? The writer loses the ability to see print.
I'm being really brave about this, but you know what? I'm really scared.
