Photo by Bacila Vlad on Unsplash
As if being twenty weeks pregnant wasn’t hard enough, I woke up blind in my right eye.
Now, most folks might rightly panic, call the ER, or at the very least, call out sick from work if they woke up and one of their most important senses simply malfunctioned. But I didn’t do that. Three years since my diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis—an autoimmune disease attacking my brain’s white matter—I was used to the daily full system review. Foot tingles? Check. Fatigue after sleep? Check. Ringing ears, funny tastes, weak left side? Check, check, check!
Eye test one, two—uh oh.
In a new ritual that would soon become routine, I sat on the edge of my bathtub, turning the lights out by closing one eye at a time.
Right side closed? On. Left side closed? Off.
My husband came in, noting how I was neither getting ready for work nor grumbling about the early hour per usual. “You okay, hon?” he asked in a slow, cautious tone, since my pregnancy up to this point had been filled with worrisome moments of bleeding and doubt.
I peered up at him and closed my right eye. “Now I see you,” I said, then swapped with the left. “Now I don’t.”
He had the reaction that I should’ve. “What?” Steve fumbled to kneel at my side to be closer. “Are you serious? You can’t see?”
“I knew something was up last night. I kept cleaning my glasses ‘cause things looked strange. When that didn’t help, I figured it was some kind of after effect from looking at my bright phone in the dark. You know, like when somebody takes a picture and all you can see for a while is the flash? But now—” I did my cutesy one-eye-trade-off again. “Sayonara right eye.”
“I don’t know what to do. Should I call somebody?”
“Take me to work so I don’t have to worry about driving in the rain.” I stood to brush my teeth and get dressed. Friday workdays were busy with patients, and I didn’t have enough time saved up to take off without real problems. Any short-circuits because of my existing neurological issue could wait. My body belonged to the baby now.
“Work? Morgan—”
“Yes. I have a few important patients today, and I’ll call the ophthalmologist while I’m there. I texted Lily to bring her stethoscope and she’ll check my blood pressure. It’s not the kid. We’ll be fine. Go get ready.” I kissed his cheek and went about my business—albeit after bumping the door jamb of the closet a few times in my effort to get dressed faster.
On our way, Steve rocked back and forth more than he usually would at the stoplights. We didn’t talk—it was too stressful to think about what might be going wrong with me, and how it could affect our baby. So I passed the time using the cars in front of us as a new litmus test.
Right side closed? Brake lights. Left side closed? Nada.
Now, truthfully, it wasn’t completely gone. In the top right corner of my vision was a hazy section that buzzed like old TV static. Everything else, however, was black, and that little bit of “working” vision distorted everything else. I had a new appreciation for people who wore eyepatches—no vision at all is preferrable to vision that’s useless.
I hopped from the car and blew Steve a kiss, keeping my cool and heading upstairs to my office—private practice in audiology, where I’d test hearing and talk about ears all day. I loved my job and had great coworkers, but my MS was still a secret. The eye would be, too.
My friend Lily, a medical assistant, sat by my desk before the workday began to take my blood pressure. “Everything okay?” she asked with raised brows. Her soft, caring voice was genuine, concerned for me and the baby. We’d only found out it was a girl two days before. “She giving you trouble?”
“Nah. Just feeling a little odd today. Blood pressure good?”
“Yours is always pretty low. Might be a little higher today, but still normal.” She put the pressure cuff and other equipment back in her blue zip-up bag.
Trying to focus on her face was a challenge. My right eye’s distortion hid some of her features, reminding me of the few times I’d had aura with migraines. As Lily stood to leave the room, she moved in and out of clarity; so much so, panic raced through my gut.
My god. How will I check anyone’s ears if I can’t see?
After making an emergency appointment with ophthalmology, I fetched my first patient: someone new to the practice who needed baseline testing. I listened to the explanation of his issues, but my mind raced as he spoke.
I can’t see this guy’s face. He’s a mystery. Shit—what if he has wax in his ears and I can’t take care of it ‘cause my depth perception’s all messed up? Now the computer screen’s wigging me out. I can’t read. Okay, I can read if I close my right eye. He can’t see that I’m closing my right eye, can he? Calm down. Take a breath.
“...and I spent ten years workin’ construction, so I’ve been around a lotta loud stuff...”
Focus. It’s not about you right now. Focus.
I rehashed the few details I missed in my distraction and stood to look in his ears. Pure routine. With the otoscope in my hand, I considered asking Lily for help.
She’ll understand; I’ll just say I need a colleague’s opinion. But now I’m here. New scope tip ready. Too late. Oh, fuck, what am I gonna do?
Leaning down, I pulled his ear back with my left hand and positioned the scope for viewing. Three, two, one...
Reflexively, I closed my right eye. Hell yeah! I look in people’s ears with my left eye! Who knew? The rest of my patients were a breeze since I knew not to panic. Even if my vision never came back, I could still do my job, even with an eyepatch. Crisis averted for now.
Husband Steve, still as gawky and scared from that morning, took me to my eye appointment after work. He wasn’t allowed in the exam room, so I was alone through my quick clicker vision test, and when they put stinging orange drops in my eyes while I squeamishly fussed.
“Wait here,” the nurse said, leaving me in a new room. “Your pupils will dilate, and I’ll come get you.”
Pupil dilation? Normally not a big deal. Sure, things look blurry, but one can still see. Yet once left alone, I snorted when I first tried to look at my phone. The blurred vision of my good eye combined with the bad turned everything into a fuzzy mess. I nervously laughed to calm my fast heartbeat.
I’m blind. Fucking blind. Why didn’t they mention this at MS orientation?
The only thing I knew about MS-related blindness was a condition called Optic Neuritis—a painful condition that hurt like a migraine, or worse. Now, in the waiting room, blind as a bat, I couldn’t recall being in any pain the night before when the issue started. New panic set in—was the issue my retina? Could it be falling off without me even feeling it? I’d been so used to blaming things on my MS, any alternatives fell by the wayside. I hoped for the best.
A new nurse directed me to the exam room. She wasn’t sure what to make of my incessant giggling, which quickly evolved into sarcasm for every little thing we did. My husband, now allowed back, followed close behind after I was seated in the ophthalmologist’s office.
I squinted at the movement in the corner. “I can’t see who just came in, but whoever you are, you’re wearing orange. Steve?”
“Yeah, hon. It’s me.” He squeezed my hand. What a kind little blob.
I bounced my brows in his direction. “You won’t have to blindfold me if you wanna try anything kinky. I can’t see shit. Blind pregnancy sex: the final frontier.”
Steve chuckled, but didn’t appreciate my joke. The shake of his voice gave him away.
Finally, the doctor. A male, tall doctor, whose nose was a spot in the center of his face, under two other spots I assumed were his eyes. He sat on my right side and clicked on a keyboard, searching for anything worthy in my file.
“Your eye exam says you’ve lost most of your peripheral vision on the right side except for this small little quadrant,” he said, pointing to a screen I couldn’t see.
“Yeah. That’s kinda why I’m here. I woke up blind.”
“Well, I don’t have any older tests, so I don’t know if it was any better than this before today.”
I cleared my throat, quelling the angry rush in my stomach. “Okay. But I’ve had that peripheral vision clicker test before where I get my glasses—I’m sure I could get them to send an old test over. I’ve never been told there was part of my visual field missing.”
“I guess we’ll need that, because I can’t compare it to anything.”
“Dude. I woke up blind. You don’t need to compare it to anything. You can compare it to my left eye. That’s how we deal with sudden hearing loss in audiology; I’m also a doctor, you know.”
His tone matched my own annoyance. “But your left eye is fine.”
“Exactly, and until late last night, my right eye matched it.” I shook my head and looked in Steve’s direction. I think.
“I’m also looking at your last MRI and there’s nothing wrong with the optic nerve.”
“My last what? You mean the MRI I had, like, fourteen months ago? Why would that help? It happened this morning.”
The doctor sighed. “Okay. Let’s see if your color perception is off.” He picked something up off the desk at my side—maybe some kind of toy?—and held it in front of me. “What color is this?”
With both eyes, it was shapeless, but color was clear. “Red.”
“Right. So your color’s okay.”
“Um. I’m looking at it with both eyes. I can’t see out of my right eye.”
“Okay,” he huffed. “So close your left eye and tell me what color it is.”
You are such an asshole. I did as he asked and didn’t care about my snarkiness. “Green.”
“Wow, really?”
“No, you idiot. It’s fucking red. I can’t see anything with my right eye!” We’d both had enough of each other by then, so I asked the last question in my arsenal. “Is my retina okay?”
“Your what?” he asked, sounding nasal and annoyed.
“My retina. I’m not in any pain, so I need to know if my retina’s falling off.”
“No. Your retina looks fine.”
“Great. Thank you. That means it’s my MS. Have a nice day.” I held my hand out for Steve, who took me out of the office, and he chastised me for being such an ass to the doctor. But how could he blame me? I was fucking blind and knew more about my problem than he did.
Days later, after a few more intense tests, I received a report that said my optic nerve looked like a mouse had chewed it. Optic Neuritis after all, though it couldn’t be treated. Over time, the blackness lightened to gray and the static cleared, but I wasn’t the same. I never would be. To this day, that eyeball is basically useless.
Right side closed? On. Left side closed? Off.
So when my daughter asks why I can’t play catch, or why her dad waves on my right side and laughs—I explain it’s because I can’t see him. He thinks it’s funny.
And he’s right.
“Hey, honey—what color is this?”
Morgan Sloan is a novelist in Northern California. They are an active member of the LGBTQ+ community and frequently writes about biographical experiences surrounding their personal and medical history. When not querying their other projects, Morgan is a working doctor of audiology, an accomplished musical and visual artist, and a certified copy editor.