“How does Fury even see these?” Asked Tony Stark.
“He Turns,” Replies Maria Hill
Sounds exhausting.
It is.
It’s perhaps not one of the most noteworthy MCU quotations, but it is one that resonated with me and it sticks to this day.
I was born with a relatively minor genetic defect that causes the carrier to develop cataracts in both eyes, completely undetectable at birth but which pop out of nowhere at the age of around 3 years and become sufficiently debilitating by the age of three and a half that surgery is a necessity.
When I was three and a half — towards the second half of the 1960s — that surgery was still based on the surgical removal of the lens with the cataract inside, and left the patient needing to wear corrective eye glasses for the remainder of their lives. The absence of a natural lens meant that those eye glasses were far more than the simple corrective style of spectacle worn by people with less extensive eye issues, and although lens technology has improved a lot and my current glasses are nowhere near as obvious as they were when I was a child, they’re still pretty serious chunks of eye wear, without which I am useless in the ocular department.
To make matters a little worse, I also suffered from amblyopia as a result of the cataracts. Let me try to explain this condition — which is generally referred to as Lazy Eye — in non-medical terms.
When you’re born, the parts of your brain that handle eyesight don’t actually work properly. They need to practice with the tools before they can really work out how to do the job. If one or other of the tools doesn’t work properly (say if it’s broken or something) then the brain gives up trying to use it and switches off most of the controls, so that it doesn’t become annoying. Once the controls get turned off, the eye itself isn’t used for anything in particular and so the muscles stop trying to keep it pointed in the right direction all of the time, and it often subsequently wanders off to do its own thing.
That’s what happened to my left eye. You could speculate that my parents didn’t act fast enough in preemptively identifying and addressing the cataract problem, given the risks of lazy eye developing at that age and the irreparable nature of that condition. You could think that they might be as vigilant and as urgent as I was with my child in the months after she was born, to make sure that this didn’t happen. Those questions aren’t ones I can answer, and they’re both now dead, so speculation is all there is on that topic now.
If I had been born a few years later, things would not have been quite so bad. The invention and eventual perfection of IOL (inter-ocular lens) technologies have revolutionised the treatment of all forms of cataract — a very good thing, because something close to half of all people over the age of 75 will develop cataracts and around one in every 250 children born have or will have cataracts. The surgery is no big deal these days, and as an adult you’re often treated as an outpatient with no need for even an overnight stay in hospital.
Your eyesight isn’t even that badly affected. Maybe reading glasses. Maybe a little corrective laser surgery afterwards.
You still need to catch it in time though, otherwise the lazy eye issue can still happen regardless of how high-tech the fix for the underlying eye condition might be.
Didn’t happen. So I have a crap left eye. Always have and always will.
What does a lazy eye actually feel like for the sufferer? What does it look like from behind the wheel?
Well it’s actually quite difficult to explain. Forget depth perception. You can see things, so to speak. Motion catches your attention in that field of view. Everything is in colour, just like your other eye, but a lot of the information coming in just doesn’t seem very useful. I couldn’t focus on anything with the bad eye. If I held things really close I could make out the shape, especially if I already knew what the thing was. Every time I’d go to buy new glasses I’d get some optometrist or other holding up eye charts and asking me to tell them how far down I could read. Nope… What eye chart? I never understood why they were so persistent after I’d recounted my opto-surgical history at them for the x-dozenth time…
It hasn’t really been an enormous disability. I drove for decades — I don’t now, mostly because I live in a city where that’s a ludicrous idea anyway — and never had an accident that could be attributed to my eyesight. Sure, depth perception…so forget about sports. But for quite some time, my eyesight was actually closely comparable to many of the people I knew who claimed (but generally did not have) 20:20 vision.
One of the less pleasant consequences of having cataract surgery the old fashioned way — like mine — is the increased possibility of retinal detachment. Your retina is this wafer thin slice of cooked ham that’s covered with the light receptor dots you need to be able to take photographs with your eyes. The light receptors all cable straight on your optic nerve and into your brain. They need the retina to act like a projector screen for your eye to focus the image into. If the retina starts to peel away from the back of your eye then your vision starts to get all distorted and eventually it can get so out of shape that you can never get it back again.
I have had three separate retinal detachments now.
The first one was in my right eye — the good one — and was pretty scary. Surgery fixed that, but for some unexplained reason it came off again and so had to go back for a re-patch a couple of years after the first incident. That second fix was equally as scary, but it went well, and although the residual damage took away more of my peripheral vision in my good eye, I am still getting by on the right side from that.
The third detachment came about nine months ago, and this time it hit my left eye — the lazy one.
Of course, the first challenge was actually identifying that there was a problem in the first place. How do you know you’re losing your eyesight in an eye you can’t see out of anyway? There were clues. Odd shapes — patches of darkness in the uninterpretable murk. Of course I suspected something was wrong, but what did the clues add up to? When I eventually saw a specialist, who confirmed that this was yet another detachment, he also said out loud the things that I’d been saying to myself since the start of the episode. Why go through the stress of surgery to fix an eye that is already broken?
Everything at the back of the eye is a nightmare. Everything is intricate and risky. If everything went perfectly well, all that would happen is that I would get back my previously useless eyeball, still unseeing but for shapes and lights.
I did agonize over that decision.
2021 has not been an easy year. Sure, I know. It’s tough for everyone, and I’m not looking for sympathy on this, but the list of things lost is long and painful. The idea of probably a month in surgery and recovery — much of which would be spent face down unable to actually do anything, if my previous experiences of retinal surgery were anything to go by — looked just about equally as unpleasant as the idea of losing the very small amount of useful vision that I’ve lived with in my left eye all my life.
During both of my previous sets of surgery, I’ve slipped into this weird semi-psychotic state of unreality, haunted by weird alien presences and what I can only describe as hallucinations, which although disturbing to me at the time, took me to places that I honestly did not want to return from.
I chose to take the blue pill.
For perhaps a month I simply watched and waited as things progressed. Much of the time I couldn’t tell the difference between better or worse. Everything seemed to be much as it had always been, except perhaps for the black blob that wavered vaguely in my left upper quadrant for a while. Then over the course of a week or so, a blotchy red-tinged curtain closed over everything remaining on that side, and my left-hand peripheral vision was no more.
I miss it.
You do need to turn. A lot.
It’s actually quite convenient that I don’t think I’ll be driving again any time soon, because I don’t think it’s something I really ought to do any more. I was used to having fairly poor peripheral vision on my right as a result of previous retinal surgery, but my overall vision cone has reduced very significantly now, and as my daily commute requires me to walk through crowded streets and subway stations, I’ve become suddenly hyper-aware of my potential for imminent collision at every step. I walk quickly. I am a foot taller and probably 25–50kg more bulky than most Hong Kong commuters, so collisions could prove fatal!
Outwardly I still look the same as I always have, and on the increasingly numerous occasions upon which I’ve found myself apologizing to a fellow pedestrian after wiping them out on the pavement, I’ve started to feel like I need to carry something to identify myself as partially sighted, in order that I might not always be glared at like a war criminal each time my new infirmity brings me into contact with an unsuspecting victim.
Could this be the chance I’ve been waiting for to begin carrying a cane to go with my assortment of hats? Matt Murdock always seemed to get away with it, and he’s way better at Kung Fu than me.
In seriousness, I am considering this. I’ve always been intolerant of people who walk ignorantly along, paying no attention to others and acting as if they’re utterly oblivious of the people they collide into. I prided myself on my attention to surroundings and my ability to predict the unpredictabilities of those who might be about to walk into my path. Now I simply can’t see them. I am the hazard.
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
