Eye Caramba!

Stuck on the bike path behind a logjam of cute kids on training wheels, I had to exercise patience and wait for Laura. Not because she was behind me, oh no, I was right on her tail. No, it was because I had to wait for her to do her spot-on impersonation of ER docs treating a heart attack victim with an AED. I geared down to prepare to pass as she charged up the virtual paddles.

“Clear!”

That was my signal. We moved in tandem into the opposing bike lane and stomped on it, tucking back into our lane after we passed mom and dad. I’m sure they had no idea one of the cyclists who just rode by was legally blind at the time.

Oh, the joys of MS. People are always taken aback when I detail all the ways multiple sclerosis can F with your body. For someone living with the disease, none of it is truly a surprise. But I like to say that when optic neuritis strikes, you never see it coming (sorry, sorry, terrible pun).

Eyesight issues affect about half of those with MS at least once—blurry vision, blindness, double vision, uncontrolled eye movements, graying of vision, you name it—and visual problems are often the first symptom of the disease (I had lightning flashes in the corners of my eyes). Thankfully, symptoms often recede partly or fully over time, but sadly not always. Although my vision is mostly 20/20 these days, for the first several years of my MS journey that certainly wasn’t the case.

When my eyes first started giving me fits, it felt like someone had mucked with the contrast and color on the TV of life. Everything was muted, flat, off. I so wanted to whack the side of planet Earth to fix the picture. My eye doc was frustrated, too, as the best he could correct my eyesight was to 20/40, right on the cusp of hanging up the keys to the car. But it wasn’t just the blurriness. Colors were mostly gone. Reds and greens became grays, so I was never 100 percent sure whether to go or stop at streetlights. Um, kind of a problem.

At least I could still sorta see. That wasn’t true on the bike trail, though, as exercising on warm days overheated my body, thoroughly cooking my vision. How bad was it? I only became aware of oncoming cyclists at the precise moment they were passing me by. That meant devising creative strategies to keep riding, one of which was the utilization of a seeing-eye-wife, er Laura. After I warmed up, she was not much more than a blob on the trail (a cute blob, for the record), necessitating me following her verbal commands in an unlikely bike ballet. But it worked.

Now I’m not advocating hopping on your bicycle when you are imitating Ray Charles (or god forbid get behind the wheel of a car), but I am advocating that you don’t turn a blind eye (ahem) to living the best life possible when confronting vision issues brought on by MS. Goodness, if I had taken that approach I’d have spent months in bed with the sheets pulled over my head. And since I enjoy most types of beans—except for canned limas, of course—that may have been catastrophic. Egad, just the thought.

You might be reading this blog with type the size of skyscrapers. You may be listening to it as a computerized audio translation. Perhaps someone is reading this aloud to you wondering quietly to herself who the heck is this optimistic Dave guy who overindulges in beans. The point is, you care enough not to let uncooperative eyesight rule your life. You work around it. You deal with it. You go on. We all have to go on.

Multiple sclerosis will always challenge us in expected and unexpected ways. Rise to the occasion and meet those challenges with a ferocious determination, and tell our shared disease, in the words of Mr. Charles, to hit the road, Jack. (Clarification: don’t actually hit said road as asphalt will do a number on your kneecaps.)