Blind
Something was very wrong. I was typing on my laptop in the hotel when I suddenly found myself struggling to read the screen.
I sat back in my chair. The afternoon mountain sunlight was filtering through the windows. I lifted my hands up and started wiggling my fingers at various places around my head. To my left, all was normal. To my right, the situation was anything but.
When I wiggled my fingers to my right side, I could see no movement. I was partially blind.
Nothing in the right half of my right field of vision was visible. It wasn’t black or even dark; no, it was simply missing. It was similar to the effect you can see at your natural blind spot, in that my brain simply extrapolated out to fill the void.
I sat there for a moment, trying to decided first if the effect was real and second what I should do about it.
Wiggle wiggle. Nothing. Wait. Wiggle wiggle. Still nothing.
I turned to Tyler. We were in Rico, Colorado on our way to photograph the solar eclipse in northern Arizona.
“So… something’s wrong,” I said in an understatement. “I can’t see anything to the right of here,” holding up my right hand to show the start of my blind area.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Tyler asked.
“Not sure.”
Adding to the confusion, the vision loss spontaneously resolved itself after about 15 minutes only to recur 15 minutes after that.
I hemmed and hawed while we poked around on the internet. It became clear that one of two things was happening: either a retinal migraine or a retinal detachment. Given that I was 30 and the vision loss was transient, a retinal migraine was far more likely than a retinal detachment, but while a migraine is benign, a detachment requires immediate surgery. I didn’t have a headache, and I didn’t feel any pain, but neither of those elements are necessarily symptoms of either of the maladies.
Consultation over the phone with Tyler’s ER-doctor cousin failed to definitively diagnose a retinal migraine, so I decided to go to a doctor rather than risk my sight.
The problem was that it was late on a Saturday in a very remote part of Colorado. Thus, we drove 50 miles to the nearest ER, located at a hospital in Cortez, Colorado. The doctors there were sympathetic but ill-equipped to make a proper diagnosis, so I was immediately referred to an opthamologist. We left the hospital and met him at his clinic.
Dressed in shorts and a “mountain bike Moab” t-shirt, the doctor was clearly there after normal business hours. He appeared to be in his 30s, and from my brief conversation I learned that he had gone so far as to get a biomedical engineering masters before changing course and earning an MD. We immediately established a rapport.
My temporary partial blindness had subsided by the time I made it into the clinic’s chair, and it was not to return again. Instead, it was replaced by a slight headache and a strong nausea — typical reactions for me when I get my pupils dialated and eyes numbed.
Several close inspections with bright lights and specialized instruments later, the doctor declared that I had very likely experienced a retinal migraine. My retinas were in fine shape, and nothing else appeared to be amiss inside my eyes.
Diagnosis in hand, I smiled my way out of the clinic, and Tyler drove us back to Rico. I was near vomiting the entire hour due to the eye drops, and I could barely stand to have my eyes open due to the incompatibility of pupil dilation and bright lights, but I was happy to have closure.
I had learned that my vision was not in jeopardy, and that knowledge was worth the time and expense.
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