In theory, it should have been the best year of my career: I had reasonable class-sizes, motivated and compassionate students, two planning periods every day, and tons of new technology with which to experiment.
Yet by the end of every school day, I was absolutely ill. Head pounding, nauseated, and utterly exhausted, I could hardly remain upright throughout dinner, never mind helping with homework and housework.
Surely it was stress, but how? Things were better than they’d ever been!
One fine Thursday, while I was enjoying lunch with friends in a colleague’s classroom, something unexpected happened. I lost total vision in my left eye. All of it. Completely gone in an instant.
The situation seemed so surreal, I began to wonder if I was dreaming. So convinced was I that this was a dream that I did not mention this unusual development to any of my dining companions. How would I even bring it up? The students were due back in less than ten minutes. No sense in stirring up drama. Besides, I still had my right eye. Logic reassured me I could deal with it later.
Logic could not squelch my anxiety, and internal panic set in. Frantically I looked around the room, willing my left eye to see. That was when I noticed a banner that said ‘OCKS!’
OCKS?
Things were getting very sci-fi, very quickly.
There are my friends.There are the tables.There are the chairs.There is the trash can.There is the door.There is the banner above the door that says OCKS.
I cleaned my area, excused myself, and returned to my own classroom, running my hand along the wall to steady my nerves. What was happening?
In the privacy of my own classroom, several very unofficial self-conducted experiments revealed that all was not well with my right eye, either. I could only see the right half of the words on the posters on the wall.
-O
-UR
-ST!
Looking down at the novel I’d hoped to read with the students that day, I knew there was no way I could convincingly translate the blurry Morse code of ink that covered each page. (More precisely, the right half of every page.)
Because they were very motivated and very compassionate students, my students cheerfully complied with my spontaneous change of plans for our lessons without question. I sensed skepticism when I asked a helper to take attendance for me, but nobody actually said anything, so no explanation was necessary.Thank goodness.
I chalked the whole thing up to stress.
Wow, that stress sure can do weird things to a person.
Everything returned to normal.
Until it happened again.
And again.
I knew what had to be done, but things had not gone well at previous eye-doctor visits.There was the time back in high school when my cousin Justin had driven me to an appointment during a snowstorm.“The roads are gonna be awful! Would you just pick already? Those-ones-look-fine-hurry-up-let’s-go!” he'd urged.
They did not look fine. They made my ears—normally my finest feature—poke out like a Disney character’s. Which I did not realize until after we’d already made the purchase, of course.
Then there was the time in college when I thought contacts would be the solution to the vision challenge AND the ears-poking-out problem. Maybe things have improved in the contact lens world since 1998, but these were no picnic. They were rigid and oddly-weighted to correct for astigmatism, and they were nearly impossible to remove. The first night I spent nearly two hours clawing at my eyes in an attempt to extricate them. During the extraction of the second one—the home stretch!—the lens flew out, shot across the bathroom, and landed directly in the toilet.Was I going to fish for it, sanitize it, and put in my eye?
Never.
Desperation forced me to set aside those experiences and to set up an appointment.
“Well, what brings you in today?” Can cheery optometrists be trusted, I wondered.
“I think I might be going blind,” I whispered, worried that if I used my speaking voice, I’d burst into tears right there in front of him. He checked my eyes while I explained the odd circumstances of late.
“Your vision is quite good," he announced, "I could write you a light prescription for glasses, if you’d like, but it might not be worth the hassle of keeping up with them.”
Wait. What?
He said he suspected that I was suffering from migraines, and he recommended that I visit my physician. Very common, lots of preventative medication available, blah-blah-blah.I struggled to listen to everything he was saying, but it was hard because my brain just kept singing I’m not going blind! I’m not going crazy!
I’d always thought that migraines were headaches, but apparently they can manifest themselves in all kinds of ways—a sort of ‘total body experience’ for a percentage of the population. Sometimes people can have an early warnings of an impending migraine-- seeing wavy lines, odd glows, or even partial words are just some of the aura indicators that a migraine is imminent.
Many things can trigger migraines, he told me. Foods, smells, lights…Lights.
Like… new super-efficient fluorescent lighting, installed at my campus last summer? Clearly it was unofficial-self-conducted mini-experiment time.
I wore sunglasses indoors at work the very next day. I may have looked weird, but I felt fantastic. By the end of that week, I felt ten years younger. It wasn’t long before I’d reclaimed my energy and health.
For the next two years, I wore sunglasses at work. The As Seen on TV HD Vision ones were my favorites because the lenses have a wonderful goldeny hue and the frames aren’t brain-squeezers. No one at work—staff nor students—ever gave me a hard time about my new accessory. My family, on the other hand, was very vocal with their opinions when I decided to get a few of those jazzy glasses-holding chains. I promised to never wear those in public—at least around them.
I never had another episode of blindness at work again. At Home Depot, twice. At Goodwill. At Kroger. At Ikea, even, but never again at work.
You never know when an energy-efficient destination will sneak up on you. I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping sunglasses with me nearly all the time, just in case.The modern world is a vicious place if you are sensitive to energy-efficient lighting.
Sometimes I wonder if there are lots of other people out there with similar symptoms, wondering why on earth they feel so awful all the time. Are they secretly terrified that they are going blind? I predict that more of these cases will surface now that regulations are becoming stricter about energy consumption and efficiency.
In fact, I should probably buy stock in As Seen on TV HD Vision glasses.
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