Eyeballs

My eyeballs are letting me down.

The fact is, they've never been much to write home about. They've never been functioning at maximum capacity. For me, it's a way of life.

When I was a little kid, I tried to take piano lessons. I was SO excited about learning the piano. But the teacher told my parents I just didn't have musical talent. (This was said with certainty about an individual who grew up to sing, play drums, guitar, some keys and a little banjo to boot, not to mention playing in several bands and writing hundreds of songs.)

Turns out, the real issue was my eyeballs. They couldn't see like they should if the music was too far from my face, which it was, and no one knew about it until after I was expelled from the world of the Piano-Forte. What did I know? I thought that's what the world looked like. And my physical limitation had me branded as a "no talent."

I have lived with this eye thing my whole life and I am not really sore about it. At this point, it would be like being sore because you have brown hair or green eyes. It's just the way it is.

And now my eyeballs have started a new journey of instability and insufficiency. They call it "Vitreous Detachment." The inside of my eyes are sort of falling apart. People don't seem to realize, in general, how gooey and gross the inside of an eye is. But when it starts coming apart in there and blocking your vision, well, it's hard to ignore. It's like looking through a veil of snot floating in salt water. And it's stubborn. It won't move out of the way

I'm told I will probably not go blind. Probably. And I have to admit that I like seeing things. But I will still have to adjust to the pseudosnot inside my eyes, clouding the sunniest of days. I also have to watch diligently for other signs of trouble.

Your body, it seems to me, is supposed to be your friend. It carries around your taste buds, which makes eating enjoyable. I'm thankful for that. It carries around your brain, which is certainly helpful. But as time goes by, this good friend starts letting you down a little bit at a time. You start losing your trust in this old buddy ol'pal. But what can you do?

In this case, it's the only friend you've got.




Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2015

Doll's Eyes

When I was a kid, my sister had one of those dolls with the eyes that moved around in it’s head on some kind of spring or something. Have you ever seen one of those? The idea is to make them seem "real," but they’re kind of creepy. You turn the head, but the eyes keep looking at you. It makes me think of that Telly Savalas Twilight Zone episode...

“My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill youuuuuuu.”

This “Doll’s Eyes” thing is what they use in hospitals sometimes to see how a person’s brain is doing. If your head is moved, your eyes should move in the opposite direction like these kinds of doll’s eyes. If the eyes move with the head, well, that’s not good. The eyes should naturally move in the opposite direction. If your brain is in good shape, when you’re looking at something and you move your head around, your eyes stay focused on the thing you’re looking at. Go ahead, try it. Look at your computer screen and move your head around a bit. Your eyes, amazingly, stay in place on the computer. (If your eyes couldn’t stay on the computer while you moved your head around, please see a medical professional RIGHT NOW!)

Anyway. To my point. I was just thinking about how amazing this is. The technical term for it is “Vestibulo-ocular Reflex.” Without it, we’d have a hard time reading a newspaper or a blog or pretty much anything else. Driving would be down-right dangerous. And you can test this too. I’ve done it. Just consciously hold your eyes in place while you move your head around. Things get blurry really fast. To focus you have to hold your head still. It's actually hard to NOT vestibulo-ocularize reflexively.

Imagine if your eyes had to move with your head. Imagine you didn’t have a vestibulo-ocular reflex. Now that would be a tough way to live. Imagine how stiff your neck would be all the time.

It’s a truly amazing thing that our eyes can stay focused on something while our heads move around. I mean, just think of the complexity of it. The way I understand it, your ears tell your eyes what to do in this situation, and a vast number of muscles and nerves all respond practically instantaneously to compensate for the movement of the head. It’s not that our eyes are weighted and are relying on gravity to stay in one place. No, it’s just muscles and nerves reacting in split second timing to the movement of our heads. It is a supremely amazing thing that I totally took for granted. And maybe you did too.

Until, hopefully, right now.


Psalm 139:14
Peace to you.



© LW Publishing 2011