Regaining 2015 vision
Looking through injured eyes
Welcome to issue 4! If you’re new to The Lovely Brains Newsletter, I’m glad you’re here to read artful dispatches from the world of brain injury recovery (with dashes of poetry and science). Catch up in the archive.
Sight is my favorite sense, so having injured eyes made life painful and decidedly less enjoyable. In 2015 and several years after, panoramas and vistas were too much for my brain to fathom. My front-porch view of Mount Olympus was superfluous to my brain’s survival—I couldn’t take in so much visual detail.
Before, these views were essential to the joy of my daily experience. I would gape at the world, watching the light, staring at the moon, scanning my jewel box valley full of manmade stars each night.
Now I looked at the world immediately around me through a squint. My daily view was of a tree in my backyard. Squeak the squirrel confrontationally chirped at me through the window as I lay in bed.
Light hurt. Reading hurt. Floaters bobbed in my eyes.
With too much sunlight, my continuous migraine intensified, crinkling from the base of my skull to the top of my head, pinching and pounding. Punching and throbbing.
When the migraine reached a full pitch, a constellation of clear dots grew in a predictable pattern, crescendoing in a half-moon aura that oscillated in my visual field. One side of the aura was smooth. The other, ragged, with an edge of transparent knives. It looked like part of a Pisanello aureole or the oldest surviving photograph of the moon.
“The brain is one of the highest energy demanding tissues of the human body. Comprising only about 2% of the body weight, it consumes 20% of the total oxygen and about a quarter of the total glucose used for energy supply. Within the brain, the visual system ranks amongst the highest energy-consuming systems.
Margaret Wong-Riley, “Energy metabolism of the visual system,” Eye Brain 2010; 2:99–116.
My worst brainstorm lasted for 10 days.
When I realized that my vision had been damaged, I found a neuro-optometrist and occupational therapist. Vision therapy was exhausting. Relearning how to coordinate my eyes intensified my never-ending neurofatigue.
My brain gasping along on energetic fumes, I couldn’t do much. Work was out of the question. Any available energy went to research, seeking medical care, maintaining my body, and resting.
But I could take photographs.
With my iPhone and Nikon, I snapped photo after photo of Mount Olympus from my yard and neighborhood as I slowly walked, coaxing coordination into my limbs and learned to see the world anew.
My eyes healed under astronomical phenomena, too.
While Donald Trump stared at the sun from the White House, unprotected, I looked at concrete.
The sun is her own photographer, the moon a mask. Through the leaves of my favorite Carpathian walnut tree, a host of sunlit scythes danced beneath my feet.
See thousands of photos NASA collected of the eclipse.
Craning my aching neck upward to see the Super Blood Wolf Moon lunar eclipse through binoculars was a worthwhile challenge.
Afterwards, I typed this poem into my Notes app.
My senses had been obscured, and with them my hope for the future. I was not used to it. I mourned the 2015 vision I once had.
When earth hides sun-reflected moonlight, the moon becomes a suspended piece of coal that baffles the mind. Few would wish to live under an unfamiliar moon.
Eclipses end, though. With a slight shift in degrees, our familiar nocturnal pearl reappears.
2020 was an eclipse year, awful and terrifying, with jagged shifts in the light caused by viral biophysics no one understands yet. It ushered in an after time.
I will remember looking up into 2020 night skies with still-healing eyes. Up at Starlink’s trail of human-engineered satellite pearls. Through binoculars at the conjunction—Jupiter and Saturn kissing fuzzy over the Oquirrh Mountains. Stargazing from my deck and being stunned by the brightest meteor I have ever seen.
Free Scientific Art (my favorite kind!)
Print out this coloring book by women in STEM! It’s so fun. Color Me PhD: A Coloring Book of Research by Women in Stem, vol. 2
“A book is a laser beam.”
Robin Sloan’s wondrously photonic rumination on the focused light of books (are you writing yours yet? I think everyone should write books.)
For the No End In Sight Crew
I just can’t say enough about how helpful Brianne Benness’ TedX talk is for someone like me with chronic health concerns. I hope it will be helpful for you, too.
Book Announcement
I picked a font for my book! Since I live with visual issues, it was really important for me to pick a font type and size that would be accessible to people, especially those with brain injuries. So, I polled a group of people with and without brain injuries, and the winner is FS Me, a font designed especially for those with learning disabilities. Isn’t she a beauty?
I hope by the time The Lovely Brains Newsletter lands in your inbox again that The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations will be close to being finished, and I’ll get you all the details about where to get it. Till next time!
If this newsletter has been helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, feel free to share it (especially with a brain injury survivor or brain injury advocate). As always, see you next month on the first.