Blindness
“You’re going to go blind”, the doctor said, nonchalantly, without turning to me even once, her eyes fixed on the machine next to her. Sitting to my right, my mother started crying. I was eighteen years old.
I have never known how it feels to have good vision. My entire life has been condensed in two shiny, sharp circles in front of my eyes and a blurry peripheral area around them: the world is always just in front of me, through the looking glass. So, when the doctor described to me the experience of my field of vision narrowing more and more into a circle that tightened up until closing in on itself, the description felt at the same time terrifying and oddly familiar, like a ghost story you’ve been listening to since a very young age but is now being retold in a stormy, thunderous night.
This is not a click-bait story. I can tell you right now that I haven’t gone blind, that a different doctor put me into treatment and that I can see now just as badly as I saw when I was eighteen years old. This -I think- is a story about fragility, or rather, about frailty, abut the weakness and brittleness of our bodies, of our lives.
I have been on a treatment for glaucoma for the last twelve years and more recently, I’ve been told that there exists a possibility that both of the doctors who attended me when I was eighteen had been wrong the whole time and that I might as well not have glaucoma at all. At this point, I really don’t care anymore. But for that reason, this is also a story about human error, about fallibility, about the fact that the things we think we know are not but mere lines traced with chalk in the immense, unfathomable universe. And that is the reason this story has no ending, no plot, no knots to untangle.
Because this is not a fiction story.
Originally published at en.mariannediaz.com on April 1, 2016.
