Cloudy With A Chance of Blindness

Illustration by Enid Mollel

When I tell people how I slowly started losing my vision, I begin most times with the day people started walking in opposite directions and I sat on the big rock outside my grandmother’s shop wondering if I had unlocked a magical dimension only I could see. 

Other times, I start with that cloudy afternoon in 2006 when the doctor told me to sit outside and the only things I could recall were my mother’s screams and the diagnosis that I had only two weeks left before I turned blind.

Today, I'd like to begin with the time Pink Panther turned blurry. 

The room was dark that day save for the light coming in from the old, wooden door with a silver mesh. I was sitting on my grandmother’s couch while my older brother sat on the cold floor. My mother should have been around somewhere in the room, trying to pacify my crying baby brother. The theme song for Pink Panther started a few minutes later, with the iconic “ba dop ba dop ba dop ba dop ba dop” flooding every part of the room. I hummed along to the music, closing my eyes and probably shaking my legs rhythmically as I had done most times when Pink Panther came on. The episode started and I switched my attention back to the television screen. What I saw was fuzzy pink everywhere and nothing else.

I remember sitting silently for thirty minutes puzzled as to why the television broadcast was so unclear that day. Was there a bad signal caused by some wind outside tilting the TV’s antennae on the roof? If the signal was so bad, why was my brother laughing at the TV screen? 

So I tried to focus harder on the mess of pink on the screen and squinted my eyes. Fuzzy. I tilted my head sideways and squinted. Still fuzzy. I turned to my brother. Not fuzzy. He was still laughing. It felt strange at that moment, almost like a joke was being told that I did not understand. Why was he laughing? What was so funny about a fuzzy pink screen? Wasn’t everyone else seeing what I was seeing? I sat up from the couch. Fuzzy pink screen. I walked halfway across the room. Pink Panther’s upright outline appeared out of the mass of overwhelming pink. I walked to the TV, my eyes now glued to the screen. The pinks were starting to make sense now. I saw Pink Panther’s yellow eyes look right back at me.

My mind turned blank. It was just the screen, myself, and a lot of confusion. If I could describe my feeling at that point, it was the equivalent of the perplexity a toddler felt when playing peek-a-boo without understanding that objects out of sight had not necessarily vanished. I maintained my standing posture for about a minute before I heard yells from behind telling me to get out of the way. Most definitely from my sibling and mother. I returned to my seat, kicking my brother on the way. 

“Do you see the TV?”, I  asked. His cackle — while still facing the screen — gave me my answer. 

Now, fifteen years later, when I look back on that day, I am tempted to do more than just recall what happened. I ask myself if I felt fear at that moment. Was I afraid? Did I realize how monumental cloudy eyesight was as a red flag? The funny thing is, while 21-year-old me might have felt fear if I happened to experience this now, seven-year-old me was not afraid. At that moment — after accepting the confusion of realizing that only I could see the world as a mess of colors — I think my primary thought was that I was special, that this was somehow the beginning of my superhero origin story. Unlike the time I had willingly put my hands in a basin of spiders so I could get bitten and evolve into Spiderman, I felt the universe, this time, was allocating me my unique superpower, though I had questioned at some point why this power was so lame. After a week of cloudy vision and missing out on watching TV, I think the next thing I felt was frustration. Frustration at how difficult life had become. Frustration that my superpower was not making me stronger. Frustration about how long this was supposed to last.

Then I went around telling people that I had superpowers that made my eyes hurt and that I could barely see a thing. But just like anyone would react to a seven-year-old telling people that they had superpowers, the general reaction to whatever complaint I voiced was to dismiss it as children’s gibberish. And sometimes, I too would ask myself if I was speaking gibberish and if my eyes were not as bad as I was making them out to be. 

But even with the frustration and the disbelief of other people, I felt no fear because I do not think I understood with full force what I was going through. That was until of course I woke up one day and my left eye went blind… no color, no light, just a pupil that no longer sat at the center of my eye. My mother screamed so much that I realized my situation was something to fear: much like how children who fall only cry when their parents make a fuss about their fall. Once the gateway for fear was opened, I think everything else about my eyesight made me fear. When I sat in the hospital with the realization that my supposed superpower was a medical condition, I was so scared, not because of what the doctor said, but because of how my parents reacted to it. And how, as the protagonist of this predicament, nobody bothered talking to me about my condition — the lack of knowledge made me fear more. In the endless fear, all I could grasp on to was the diagnosis of Glaucoma and the conclusion that I had been sick all along. But even with those pieces of certainty, the uncertainty surrounding what my future would look like sat heavily on my chest, and it still stays uncomfortably in my chest in 2021.

Like every other time I have had to talk about my vision, I reach the point where there is nothing left to say. It seems odd to stop, and yet I tell myself that not all of my stories need to have a neatly tied ribbon to end them if my life is still being unraveled. And so, I end.