Better eyesight a brilliant gift
On a Thursday morning two months ago I was as blind as a bat. Had been like that my whole life. Now and then, friends and colleagues would try on my glasses and, without fail, say one of two things. Either, “ugh, feeling sick now” or “wow, very blind”.
It’s remarkable how many times you can hear that you’re blind without ever actually feeling it.
But, that Thursday I finally started realising I was quite blind. Only, I didn’t realise it until I wasn’t blind anymore.
That Thursday, I had my eyes lasered. People who have their eyes lasered like to say things like “you must do it” and “changed my life”.
I don’t like to say those things. I like to describe in great detail the big machine they slide you under and the machine’s Star Trek-like voice that announces when the suction cup has engaged with your eyeball and how weird it is to watch — from inside your own eye — as the doctor wipes that eyeball clean. It’s pretty weird, let me tell you.
I also like to describe how quickly I recovered from the red-hot sting of the operation (three hours) and how blurry my world was for a few days (like you’ve spent hours swimming in a chlorinated pool with your eyes open underwater).
Now, after two months of waking up to perfectly sharp edges, I get what the fuss is about. I’ve had a taste of the seeingeye world and I like it.
I’ve been converted on the road to Damascus (eye joke).
In a weird way, accepting how blind I was has made me feel a lot more fallible.
My eye doctor reckons if I’d been born 300 years earlier, my life would’ve turned out completely differently.
Back then, I might have died in any number of exciting ways. It might’ve been a snake I didn’t see before I stepped on it. Or a lion that chased me down without me even getting the chance to run away. Or maybe I’d just tumble down a ravine one night.
More likely, my death would have been far less dramatic.
The doctor reckons I was so blind I might just have died from uselessness. Unable to hunt for food or safely collect water, I would have had to rely on my village. A whole community’s generosity would be needed to keep me alive.
Short of specialising in basket-weaving, fortune-telling or some other indoor activity involving excellent up-close vision, I would’ve been a total burden. The blind old lady of the village.
It’s a confronting scenario to imagine. It’s easy for us millennials to think we’re a bit special. Especially those of us who’ve grown up in an English-speaking country, in the developed world, able to educate ourselves and go off on life’s big adventure. Very little holds us back and what does hold us back is often fixed with contact lenses or myriad other impairment reducers.
It’s even more confronting to realise that I didn’t just get lucky with the timing of my life, but also where it’s lived.
Right now, there are people in Third World countries unable to live their lives because of the same small defect I had.
Even $1 glasses are out of reach for them. They can’t work. They can’t feed themselves and their families. And the thing holding them back is something so easily corrected that I barely realised the extent of my problem.
So yes, I was blind. Blind enough for it to, in another time or place, change my life completely.