Sudden Bouts

Some years ago, I had a conversation with my roommate wherein I decided to reveal that I had a headache. At the time, it was quite unusual for me to get any sort of headache, let alone one of sufficient severity for me to bring it to the attention of another. This was a rare occasion, indeed. In a demonstration of his boundless compassion, my roommate reassured me, “don’t worry bro – that’s just the tumor!” Not to be too put off by his callous disregard for my well-being, I replied, “well, that explains the sudden bouts of blindness.” The use of the more server “blindness” over the milder and more expected “dizziness,” for which I had actually corrected mid-sentence, was enough to elicit the expected laugh. But, what even made me think to perform the substitution? Basically, a previous experience with the matter was still fresh in my mind.

Some time before this conversation, I was at work unpacking servers for delivery and setup. The work was tedious, involving opening boxes, taking out the server and necessary accessories to be loaded onto crash carts, and discarding everything else with the original packaging. As I worked, my vision faded to a foggy white. This wasn’t the first time I had lost my eyesight, but it had only ever happened in one eye at a time and had never lasted this long before. After pausing my work and waiting a few seconds for my vision to return, to no avail, I finally reported to my coworker that I couldn’t see. He asked if I was serious. I assured him that I was while groping around for a surface on which to sit. I found a short stack of unopened server boxes and sat down for a bit until my sight returned. My coworker asked if I was okay. I told him that I wasn’t sure, but I got back to work. To this day, I don’t know if he ever decided whether I was telling the truth, or just trying to pull one over one him.

That experience terrified me. Not just the prospect of complete and permanent blindness, but the fact that it could happen with no apparent external cause. I believe that it was the result of stress, mostly from work, so I have taken steps since that day to better manage my stress. There has been no recurrence of that condition, not even a milder single-eye episode, since that time. Also, I later had a CT scan, which revealed nothing unusual. My ophthalmologist hasn’t found anything strange about my eyes, although I never actually told him about the episodes. In fact, until now, I haven’t told anyone besides my coworker. I’m not sure what prompted me to finally document the incident, but it feels like something I have long needed to describe.