On his blindness

On Friday morning when I woke up, I was blind.

Not entirely blind - I still had peripheral vision.  The problem was that right at the centre of my vision - the place you are looking in other words - I had no sight at all.  So, when I got up and stood on the bathroom scales, what should have looked something like this

looked instead like this.

At first, I thought this was A Good Thing: I must have lost a useful amount of weight.  Then it struck me that I wasn't seeing a smaller number there, but no number at all.  Except, if I looked away a bit, I could tell there was actually a number there.  It was only when I looked at it that it disappeared and just turned uniform grey.

I then realised that I couldn't see whatever I looked at directly.  I must say that I was impressed by the ability of my brain to guess as what should fill the blind spot; it seemed to work out from the colours immediately surrounding the blind spot what it should tell me I was seeing, which is how I had managed to get to the bathroom scales in the first place without realising my eyesight was deficient.

I mentioned this to the Dearly Beloved (aka She Who Must Be Obeyed).  I probably shouldn't have sprung it on her because she went a bit pale.

"What are you going to do?  How can you do photography, or play badminton or bridge?  Or drive?"

I hadn't thought of that.

When she opened, we called our local optician.  She asked me about the symptoms and then said "You probably have a migraine."

That was the good and bad news.  The headache struck shortly after, with the violence of a tropical storm.

I spent the rest of the day in a darkened bedroom, groaning softly to myself.  The following morning my head was better and so was my eyesight.

Lucky me.  I can still take photographs and bridge and will be back to badminton and driving in the not too distant future.  See, life's not so bad.