Red Right Hand or The Macula Vernacular
Take a little walk to the edge of town
and go across the tracks
where the viaduct looms
like a bird of doom...
croons Nick Cave at the start of his haunting, doom-laden, Paradise Lost inspired hit from 1994, Red Right Hand. But what (you might well ask) has this song to do with my sight loss and why am I quoting it? Well, not a lot, apart perhaps from the fact that it's recently re-emerged as the theme tune for the Peaky Blinders series. Do you get it? They blind people with razor blades. (Yep, I know. Both a horrifically graphic thought and a murderously tenuous link). Leaving that to one side, it is also the first song that came to mind when I remembered my own ‘red right hand’ moment nearly thirty years ago.
and go across the tracks
where the viaduct looms
like a bird of doom...
croons Nick Cave at the start of his haunting, doom-laden, Paradise Lost inspired hit from 1994, Red Right Hand. But what (you might well ask) has this song to do with my sight loss and why am I quoting it? Well, not a lot, apart perhaps from the fact that it's recently re-emerged as the theme tune for the Peaky Blinders series. Do you get it? They blind people with razor blades. (Yep, I know. Both a horrifically graphic thought and a murderously tenuous link). Leaving that to one side, it is also the first song that came to mind when I remembered my own ‘red right hand’ moment nearly thirty years ago.
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While it’s true to say that I wasn’t anywhere near a looming viaduct, (though there was a looming mountain close by), I had just crossed a track on the edge of town (a track to reach the Snowdonia Mountain Railway in North Wales to be precise), when I looked down and noticed that my own right hand appeared to have turned red (and just for clarification, there wasn’t a Peaky Blinder in sight – so I can’t blame them).
After much eye rubbing and blinking, I looked again. Nope, it was still there – and both my hands were red – and now everything else around me had turned red! What was going on? Then I realised that this weird visual anomaly only happened when I looked through my |
This is the Snowdonia Mountain Railway - read the article, it'll make sense.
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right eye – or both eyes together – which meant that something was seriously wrong with that eye and I had to find the nearest optician pronto! The nearest optician told me that I’d have to go to the nearest hospital straight away to get my eyes checked out. Was I having another retinal detachment? The nearest optician wasn’t sure, which wasn’t reassuring and unfortunately the nearest hospital didn’t have an eye specialist on hand, so we drove back to Yorkshire – which wasn’t very near at all.
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Before we continue. Have you ever had a gonioscope shoved onto your eyeball? It’s an odd (and unnecessary) question and an even odder (but necessary) experience. I have had it done to me more times than I care to remember, and I dread it every time. A gonioscope (or Goldman lens) is a contraption (not the technical term) that eye specialists use to torture people with sight loss. I guess I should also say that it’s quite a useful device that enables these eye professionals to see more clearly into the front or back of your eye. It’s placed directly on to your eyeball and moved around at alarming angles (at least that’s how it feels) while a light is shone straight into your eye avoiding your now immovable and forced-open eyelids. Sometimes they put anaesthetic drops into your eye before the procedure and sometimes (if they think you’re brave) they don’t. I’m not brave. Just so you know.
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A torture instrument also known as a gonioscope
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Back to the story. After half an hour of examining both of my eyes in this very uncomfortable manner (for me, not him), the ophthalmologist announced that he could not detect any new retinal detachment (cue big PHEW! Slow exhaling of breath, tickertape parade, dancing girls, marching band, etc). However, (now don’t start getting too cosy) there was a new problem. “Hold on a minute!” I exclaimed, as I grabbed the ophthalmologist by the scruff of the neck. “A new problem! Nobody told me there could be NEW problems!” Of course, this reaction, like the tickertape parade, dancing girls and marching band, is all a product of my overactive imagination. Rather, I grabbed my Peaky Blinders’ cap, pushed past the ophthalmologist knocking him and his damn gonioscope to the floor and raced screaming out of the building. No, that didn't happen either. Instead, I listened patiently to an explanation about why I was suddenly (and literally) seeing red.
It seemed that it all had to do with the little old macula - remember the pesky macula? The central part of the retina at the back of your eye that controls all the main seeing? My condition (degenerative myopia in case you’ve forgotten) was now causing an abnormal growth of small blood vessels in the area of my central retina and some had burst. If you’re a plumber, you might understand this concept. That meant that there were little pools of blood (I like to think of them as ‘pools’, but of course this is probably an overstatement) at the back of my eye and that is why everything now had a red tinge. I was told that my body would reabsorb the blood and it’d eventually go away; however, there would be damage left behind and changes to my sight. Plus, it would get worse over time and there was nothing they could do. Oh boy! I had to pack away the tickertape and send the dancing girls home. The marching band insisted on coming home with me though, and we had to hire a bus since I couldn’t get them all in my Citroen Picasso.
It seemed that it all had to do with the little old macula - remember the pesky macula? The central part of the retina at the back of your eye that controls all the main seeing? My condition (degenerative myopia in case you’ve forgotten) was now causing an abnormal growth of small blood vessels in the area of my central retina and some had burst. If you’re a plumber, you might understand this concept. That meant that there were little pools of blood (I like to think of them as ‘pools’, but of course this is probably an overstatement) at the back of my eye and that is why everything now had a red tinge. I was told that my body would reabsorb the blood and it’d eventually go away; however, there would be damage left behind and changes to my sight. Plus, it would get worse over time and there was nothing they could do. Oh boy! I had to pack away the tickertape and send the dancing girls home. The marching band insisted on coming home with me though, and we had to hire a bus since I couldn’t get them all in my Citroen Picasso.
My wonky sight or Chesterfield's famous twisted steeple? You decide.
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Now, as I've said, all this happened about twenty-eight years ago and eventually I was forced to evict the marching band from my spare bedroom because they were making too much noise. In addition, as the ophthalmologist had predicted, the blood vessels under my macula continued to grow and pop (my thesaurus also suggests the words burst, erupt, spurt, rupture, surge and gush for this phenomenon – I’ll let you decide which one you prefer) at irregular intervals and eventually I lost all the useful central vision in my right eye. Bummer, right?
The damage to the macula also had an odd side-effect in that it began to distort not only my central vision but the surrounding areas of vision too. So, straight lines became wavy or bent and I started having double vision. Most churches now took on the appearance of that famous one at Chesterfield - you know, the one with the crooked steeple? Have a look at the photo to the left. Yes, that one. I also ended up with a tiny, but annoying, sparkly spinning disco ball right in the centre of my sight which has never gone away. It's been described to me as the last remnants of my dying macula and my brain's attempt at making sense of the light it's still receiving. It's incredibly annoying since it obscures my central sight, meaning I don't see people's faces well, can't read text properly unless it's blown up to the size of a small planet, affects my depth perception, and, worst of all, I can't stand bloody disco music. |
So, to sum up, my macula ain't that spectacular anymore, and the one in my left eye is trying to hang on for dear life. Is it inevitable that the less damaged one will go the same way? Is it possible that the marching band will try and move back into my spare bedroom? In the words of the Gallagher brothers ... Definitely Maybe.
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