On my 21st birthday, as I was attempting to renew my driver’s license, I found out that I was going blind.
After botching the eye exam, I went to an optometrist for what I presumed would be a typical prescription for glasses. As it turned out, my eyes were on their way to being about as useless as my expired license.
To make a long explanation short, I was diagnosed with a degenerative cornea disorder called keratoconus, which warped my vision. After further tests, I was told that there was no way of knowing how fast my eyesight would deteriorate or how bad it would get — only that it would get worse.
It was one hell of a birthday gift.
My vision in my left eye plummeted fast while the right eased into blurriness more gradually. At first, that just meant a bit of difficulty reading without my new glasses. However, within a year, it would become dangerous for me to drive at night.
I was working as a pizza delivery driver at the time, so it seemed increasingly likely that I would eventually harm myself or others while hauling someone’s extra-large meat-lover’s supreme.
The main issue for me was always color and light distortion. Because of the bulge in my cornea, every single light source was refracted into a dozen or so separate light points, and each of these light points was surrounded by a washed-out halo.
So imagine what it was like to drive at night around Christmas time with zillions of multicolored lights everywhere. And, as I was living in rainy Washington State, the rain on my windshield further distorted the lights, making matters even worse.
By the time I eventually got rid of my car at the age of 24, driving had become like moving through a formless melting plasma of light and color. There were times when I literally had no idea what was in front of me, and I only made it where I was going by pure luck.
The sole solution to my condition involved getting a cornea transplant for the worse of the two eyes — an expensive procedure that was far beyond my means. Over a decade would pass before I would finally have medical insurance to cover it (thanks Obama — truly).
By that time, my vision was terrible, I had a dramatic lazy eye, and I often wore an eye patch over the other. Just call me Nick Fury. People did.
My surgery was relatively fast and entirely painless, though I did wake up near the end to watch them stitch my new cornea into place.
I was told that I could remove my bandages the next day, but when I did, I found that I was so sensitive to light that I could barely open my eyes. So for 3 days, I restlessly paced my apartment in almost total darkness, listening to one audiobook after another.
Once the pain and sensitivity subsided and I could open the eye well enough to take a proper look around, I immediately noticed that the sea of color and light that had obscured my vision for nearly a decade was gone. I still had a ways to go before everything was completely corrected, but this was a tear-jerkingly positive start.
Over the coming months my vision steadily grew sharper, and after a few progress checkups, I was given the OK to resume normal activities (more or less).
While the day to day differences were immediately noticeable, it wasn’t until I traveled to Spain a few months later that the profundity of the change really hit me.
I was at the Prado in Madrid attending a special exhibition of Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec. The first room of the exhibit was mostly rough sketches, so I wasn’t initially struck by anything unusual. Then I walked into the next hall.
While I had seen many of the Picassos hanging there before, my immediate realization was that I had, in fact, never really seen them. The Forced Embrace, The Frugal Meal, Woman from Majorca, The Serenade, and so on — never before had I looked at a painting and seen so much.
The clarity, the depth of field, the colors — all in their intended places, rather than washed together in a chaotic mess. Was this what everyone else had been seeing all along?
I moved through the remainder of the exhibition in a daze. Everyone else seemed to be experiencing emotions ranging from mild boredom to tepid interest, but from moment to moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d burst out laughing or crying.
Outside, behind the museum it was pure autumn — multicolored leaves cast in soft light — and once again I was struck with the sense that I was seeing it for the very first time.
Did you know that the crown of a tree consists of hundreds of separate leaves? I didn’t. Or at least I’d forgotten that it was possible to see them as anything more than one large smudge.
We take too many things for granted — our eyesight, the clarity of a painting, the leaves of a tree — forgetting how fragile it all really is. There are times when we can regain what we’ve lost, but those are a precious few. The best we can hope for is to make do in our reality with our best.
I’ve learned to not only appreciate what I have while I have it but to celebrate it to the fullest.
That means enjoying all the paintings and sunsets I can get my eyes on.
