Vision Therapy Eyewear on Acrylic Blanket

A Nebulous Number of Days of Atomity and Memory

Sight Unseen

A few months ago, I experienced an inane moment that resulted in carpet burn on my elbow, but which also ultimately brought me back to a forgotten routine.

I’m rather short-sighted. Consequently, my glasses are either on my face or never far from reach. At night, when I retire, I set my specs on the pillow beside my head for easy access the following morning. But one particular morning, my glasses slipped off the pillow and down through the gap between the headboard and mattress to the floor beneath.

I couldn’t squeeze my arm through the narrow escape route and the space underneath my bed, like every other available space in my small footprint, is used for storage (including my oven, by the way). The area is loaded with everything from archival legal documents to holiday decorations. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to begin the arduous process of removing boxes and other stuff from underneath the bed frame, and while doing so, I repeatedly tried reaching for the specs. But they had fallen right at the middle point of the bed’s width.

It became evident that no matter what I removed from underneath the mattress, I still wouldn’t be able to reach my glasses because my arm simply wasn’t long enough. And the space between the bed frame and the floor was too slender for me to edge my torso closer to the elusive spectacles. Neither moving the bed nor dismantling it was an option for me to do on my own – I have an inflexible mattress resting on top of an extraordinarily heavy and thick organic futon mattress (that’s another protracted story), on top of the box spring. Consequently, I went into MacGyver mode.

My next move was to get some tongs that were part of a kitchen gadget set stuffed into a hand-crafted Mexican urn. The utensils, however, hadn’t been used in a long time, so I spent about twenty minutes scrubbing them all. I was clearly procrastinating. Finally, I took the immaculately clean tongs to the bed and quickly realized I couldn’t actually see precisely where my glasses were located due to my short-sightedness. I was hesitant to just poke around because I was concerned about scratching the incredibly expensive bifocal transition lenses or the equally costly titanium frames.

I did manage to retrieve my glasses unscathed (except for the carpet burn on my elbow) and I realized only afterwards I could have popped in some contact lenses to see my target better. But, I haven’t been wearing contacts during the pandemic, and opening up two new packets of lenses for a single-use occasion seemed a waste.

This whole ridiculously unimportant series of events ended up serving as a reminder that I hadn’t been wearing my vision therapy eyewear. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with cataracts. Cataract removal surgery is about as commonplace as getting a pair of glasses these days. In my case, however, it’s more complicated. More than a decade ago, one of my eyes became infected, the infection was misdiagnosed, and by the time it was correctly identified, I did not respond to anti-virals. Not only did I almost lose my cornea, but I was off work for six months and I lived in the dark (as I became incredibly light sensitive and couldn’t tolerate even a low-level light from a computer). I also endured the most excruciating chronic eye pain one could imagine. I called it my vampire period because going out into the sunlight felt like someone had driven a wooden stake into my eye.

I had reached a point of hopelessness with healing the infection until one of my gym instructors recommended a medical intuitive he knew. Although I had some experience with energy work and was a reiki master myself, this kind of treatment was outside my realm of knowledge. But when you’re desperate and in that much pain, one will try just about anything for relief.

It took but one visit with the intuitive to send me on a path of healing. I stopped taking the anti-virals and tossed out all the supplements a naturopath had previously prescribed. The virus cleared up within a matter of weeks and, luckily, the scarring of the cornea was to the side of the pupil and did not impair my vision. The whole episode turned out to be one of the biggest turning points in my life – I was not only catapulted head first into spiritual discovery, but I quit my job of twenty-plus years, enrolled in a creative writing program, and wrote my first book.

Over the years, to my optometrist’s utter surprise, the thinned cornea returned to a healthy thickness and moisture level. Unfortunately, when I was delivered the cataract diagnosis several years ago, I was also advised that cataract surgery might retrigger the infection I had had. And to add insult to injury, I had also developed a number of floaters that were utterly annoying and impacting my vision.

I went into an emotional tailspin and the stress of possibly losing my eyesight seriously depleted my already fragile immune system. For a short time, I considered the surgery but, at the last minute, bailed and I decided to postpone it indefinitely. Instead, I made the decision to find more effective ways to minimize stresses in my life (like retiring), and to deal with my eye health in non-traditional ways, such as retraining my eyes using vision therapy eyewear and working again with energy practitioners to restore my immune system.

My eyes are my body’s Achilles heel and it hasn’t escaped my awareness that the liver meridian is connected to the eyes. When I digest food or water, my eyes swell up, sometimes much worse than other times, depending on the food or water. The liver is the organ where anger is stored in our bodies and I can’t tell you how many practitioners have told me I have been holding a lot of anger in my body – they couldn’t all be wrong, could they?

I could never figure out what I was reputedly so angry about, but I’ve been sorting that all out this past year, and it’s not all necessarily from this lifetime.  But thanks to some energy medicine protocols I have been doing lately, I’ve been noticing improvements with my eyes and greater tolerance for food. And since the day when my glasses slipped into the abyss, I’ve returned to using the vision therapy eyewear a little bit every day, and by doing so, my brain learns to see ‘around’ the cataracts. But I have no intention of letting my purple titanium bifocals disappear out of reach again.