Eyes are weird things although I am glad I have mine. I have noticed in the last couple of years a new quirk which I suppose I could class as deterioration or degeneration and it might be but if so the question is also whether it is brain-related or actually associated with actual the eye/s it/themselves (with the obvious proviso that it takes a brain to have eyes that work). It is seeing things move out of the corner of my eye. It happens quite often, though it is never major, but it’s convincing and I never can’t look. Black shapes that cause me to believe either that a small thing (an insect or a rodent perhaps?) is passing just at the edge of my field of vision, or that perhaps the shadow of something behind me is registering on something closer by for instance on the edge of my glasses.
I am reminded of Pip Proud’s stroke and the effect it had on his vision. He was very functionally blind, no doubt about it, but it was his brain not his actual eyes – naturally, because I can’t imagine your eyes would generally be affected by a stroke. So, his eyes would send a message to his brain which would give him a picture of something associated – presumably from fifty plus years’ stock images stored away. If he saw a dog or a cat, for instance, he wouldn’t see it but his brain would give him the pictogram of ‘dog’ or ‘cat’. He could read really large words, too (he once read a newspaper headline from a point-of-sale poster to me) which I suppose might suggest that words were hieroglyphs. He wasn’t very good at describing what he saw to me or I wasn’t very good at understanding it, or both, but in any case, it was unusual.
When I think back to Pip’s situation as it unfolded I think there was probably more opportunity to bring him back from that stroke with therapy but (a) it wasn’t my job, which sounds cruel and rude, but he did have family who didn’t need me pushing in to his situation and were doing the best for him as they were advised (b) I don’t think it was clear when it first happened what had happened (c) he was his own worst enemy, or at least, circumstances from his earliest days had conspired against him and set him up psychologically to be terrible to himself, both accepting things he shouldn’t have accepted and lashing out against people who were acting in his own best interests. The (d) I guess is that his alcoholism and depression fed on each other and made him, to say the least, difficult. That, in any case, is how I saw it. But then again I don’t know how much of his own assessment of his post-stroke situation was paranoia and how much was true. I mean I always took his side, and kept my opinions on what was and was not true to myself. I actually don’t know ultimately who was making decisions on his behalf.
This is probably a weird place to get to from ruminating about my eyes but it happened.
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