This is a third in a series of posts on my odyssey with a dilated eye. I’ve tagged all the posts in the series here. On a Sunday evening, I found myself with a dilated eye in my blind eye that freaked me out. By the next Friday, I had in hand a prescription for pilocarpine…
This is a second in a series of posts on my odyssey with a dilated eye. I’ve tagged all the posts in the series here. So I found myself, unexpectedly, with a right eye (a blind eye) that had completely dilated, for reasons unknown, a few months after my retina had detached. After an emotional…
This is a first in a series of posts on my odyssey with a dilated eye. I’ve tagged all the posts in the series here. I was born with an optic nerve coloboma in my right eye. In mid-adulthood, that optic nerve detached. Because the vision was terrible to begin with, a retina specialist strongly…
Many years ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with brain cancer. The cancer was treatable, but the doctors told her that her right eye was going to have to come out. She was devastated. So she came to talk to me, the one person she knew who was blind in one eye. We talked…
My whole life I’ve had terrible vision in my right eye. Terrible. No peripheral vision, and only the most low functioning of vision — like looking through a bad static image. I used the eye so little that sometimes I found myself closing my right eyelid without even thinking about it. I didn’t pay much…
One not-unimportant question for a person blind in one eye is: do you share? Do you tell people? There are pros and cons to each. The pros to telling people is that it might help explain times when your lack of eyesight is a problem: when you don’t see a person who waves at you…
Being blind in one eye is mostly not a big deal, but it does have occasional irritations. One of those is whether to talk about it with other people or not. I don’t talk much about it with other people unless there is a good reason for doing so, like doctors. There are some people…
For a person who can’t see out of one eye, most of what you think about are the drawbacks, like not being able to play baseball. But there are some benefits. You Most Likely Won’t Get Drafted If you’re a man living in the United States, you have to register for Selective Service when you…
When it comes to driving with monocular vision, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that your blind eye will be a factor in your driving. No getting around it. You’ll have to deal with depth perception issues and a smaller field of vision. I’ve been in two accidents in my…
When I was in college I had a blind chemistry professor. He never told us how he became blind, but some of his comments about the importance of protecting our eyes in the lab did make me wonder if it was an accident. It’s important to take care of your eyes even when you have…