Seeing is Believing…

Today is a day of celebration!!! It’s Saturday, sunny, I am showered with brushed teeth (I will do hair tomorrow), but that is not why I want to celebrate…well, not exactly celebrate with a party, drinks and some fireworks, but appreciate and honor (that’s more appropriate I think…)the day. But let me first give you some background…because I annoyingly must take a long-winded path around general topics before I can get to a point

When I saw myself for the first time…and that was only after I could manage to get into a wheelchair on my own and stand upright to reach the mirror in my room. Hint to all rehabilitation hospitals: lower your mirrors above your basins please. What I saw staring back was…to say a ‘shock’ would be euphemistic, and even if I screamed “The horror! The horror!” like Kurtz, it would not have been too melodramatic. The last time I looked in mirror I was out on for an evening at the bar and looked, not pretty, but presentable. What I saw that day in my room was a human with stubbles for hair – apparently a wannabee hairdresser in I.C.U. tried to style it… you know I’m joking right! It had to be shaved for all the drainage pipes in my head. I had no front teeth (that explained why people battled to understand what I’m saying…), the dimple in my chin gone (and I sort of like that little dent…) and the little tip pointing up at the end of my nose also gone, making it obvious that it’s just a big, round pig snout. But the best were my eyes! They have always been a boring brown, but I always considered them kinda beautiful…my mother always used to say I look like a little innocent Bambi with my big, brown eyes. Now my one eye was staring above the door on my left and when I focussed on that eye, to get a clearer look, I saw that my right eye was now searching for something on the floor to the right.

You see due to the damage I had acquired vertical strabismus with hypertropia…medical linguistics…in other words both my eyes appeared skew but alternating between each other. Not only does it look horrible but imagine what it does to your vision to suddenly see the world this way after 40 years of looking at things normally. The best way I can describe it was that everything around me looked like I was looking through a kaleidoscope, permanently.  Seeing scrambled images, resulted in me wearing an eye patch in order just to see an image and not hundreds of them. But that also took away my ability to see in three dimensions – you need to see an image with both eyes for that….

Today, exactly four years ago I finally went for an operation to see normal again.  You take things for granted that you are not even aware exists sometimes. I remember running a bath that afternoon after the operation, and the humidity of the steam loosened the patch I had over my eye. I was busy sending a text and suddenly, the phone screen in my hand eerily rose like a sci-fi movie and I realised I am seeing 3D. I know it sounds trivial, but after a year of seeing scrambled, one dimensional patches of the world around me, I was dumbstruck, absolutely in awe. For weeks I kept on pointing at everything with excited shrieks of  “look at that! Look at that!” and then if would just be the backside of a car or a glass on the counter.

So, today I am celebrating the bright sunshine, shining through my window, the childlike bunnies on my paintings, the love in my doggie’s big, brown eyes as I pet her, and that little cute, button nose of my daughter, that curls up even more when she lights up the room with her spontaneous, bubbly laughter!