An interesting thing happened on the way the way through life this month. Learned another good lesson about things and the way things are. I have learned that you do not see with your eyes. The eyes are just a physical lens through which information is filtered through to your optic nerve, which sorts through all the electrical impulses and makes some sense of the physical world around you for your brain to tell your hands and body how to respond. You really can’t see with your eyes any more than you can read these words on a monitor detached from a hard drive. You have to be connected.
Now, I found this out because one fine day, my nerves decided to take a sabbatical. No vision, upper right eye. No pain. Vacation weekend…hmm. Probably a migraine – let’s forget about it. Go on to have fantastic getaway up north, albeit on ¾ vision. However, having to drive in the dark in the rain on the way home was terrifying, not being able to see, and with the lights doing funky things in my remaining vision, and it was decided that we should probably get some medical input on the situation. Sunday evening, then, after arriving home and getting Phil in bed, we head out to the local ER.
Detatched retina. That was the diagnosis that evening. It was after midnight, and so they set up an early morning appointment with an ophthalmologist in Milwaukee. Upon arrival, it was pretty much agreed that this was the problem, but upon exam the evidence turned up otherwise. My retinas a fine. Field of vision test. MRI with gadolinium. Fifteen vials of blood. Yes, I’m making a long journey short.
After looking at the MRI, the actual diagnosis is optic neuritis. Apparently there is some inflammation on my optic nerve, causing shorts in the system. While my vision is a complete field again, it’s cloudy at times, too bright at others – kind of like a flash went off in your face and you can’t see real well? Sometimes there are very interesting flashes of light and bouncing balls. The fun part, however, is when my perfectly healthy eyes are taking in information, and my nerves decide to scramble the information coming in from each eye. Some information goes this way, some goes that way, and some just disappears from the screen. Signals are sent to the brain and body that register as spinning and twirling. My hands will drop what they are holding in a vestigial response to falling. If I am talking, my words begin to slur, as it feels for a brief time that I am in a centrifuge, and the gravity is pulling my tongue and brain off to one side. I figure it’s best just to shut up,because I sound ridiculous. Much easier if I just close my eyes and let it pass. Which up to this point it invariably does. And then I recompose, pick up what I dropped and carry on with my regularly scheduled life.
So the treatment for this is a three day IV cocktail of methylprednisolone, followed by an oral prednisone taper for 8 days. Wonderful stuff! (not). After the fun of an IV, you get a burning pain in your arm, a mouth that tastes like you are sucking on a penny, a response in your gastric system that is completely foreign, fatigue you have not known since childbirth, and night sweats that have you waking up with your fingers pruned up like you’ve been in the tub and sheets that need to be changed before you can go back to bed. Throw in a spinal tap mid-treatment and call it a week. When will this end?
So, what exactly do you do when your nerves decide to take a holiday? Or get inflamed? Go on strike? Not perform as expected? Suddenly I’m on the shocked side of what I take for granted every day. Nerves are supposed to WORK right. How dare they not! I mean, whose side are you on, anyway? Where in my control center do I tell my nerves to knock this shit off? Get back to work and do it right! I’m giving you all you need, I’ve got a clean bill of health, I eat right, I exercise – all the good stuff. I can still dead-lift 120 pounds out of a wheelchair for heavens sake. Carefully at that. What’s with the slacking off?
As I interrogate my nerves, my poor eyes are like, “Hey, it’s not our fault!”. And I realize it’s true. Got great eyes. Yeah, they are nearsighted and farsighted, but they are 100% functional. It’s that pesky nerve. And so I’m standing in the kitchen, washing dishes. Cleaning out the pan I cooked the granola in, scrubbing the bottom of it. Suddenly the dish soap bottle doubles, as does the scrubbie next to it. But instead of just stopping, I begin to think: This is NOT as it seems. The room is not, in fact, spinning. Gravity is still functioning the way it was just a second ago. I am still in an upright position. There is only one bottle of Dawn sitting in front of me. My eyes are seeing things the way they are, but my optic nerve is telling me lies. So I take these thoughts, and I close my eyes against the false information, and I concentrate on my hands. I can feel the crumbs and debris of the baked on wheat germ on the bottom of the pan. I can feel the warmth of the water. Despite the fact that my hands want to drop the rag and wait out the spin, I am forcing little bits a pieces of my brain to focus – focus - focus – on what I am doing, and how I am doing it. Slow down if necessary, but push forward. Make other parts of your brain connect and put the pieces of information in the correct context. And in a few seconds, it’s over, and I feel like I’ve just taken a tiny bit of control back from my impish nerves. Wait until it happens again, and practice – maybe I don’t need my eyes as much as I think.
Maybe this is the concrete example of what it means to walk by faith and not by sight. It’s more than a little disconcerting to realize that all may or may not be as it seems. That while your eyes cannot deceive you, your nerves sure can mess with you and your whole concept of reality. It can distort and twist and bend your perceptions, and cause you to make decisions based upon what is not, in fact, happening or true. To what do you turn when you realize that what you are seeing could all be a lie? What, then, is true? Where then is your faith, and what exactly is it in?
