Discussion
I had serious glaucoma, particularly in my left eye, which can now only see the faintest blobs of color, and can't read letters at any size, and so on. Not blind, blind is different, but generally pretty useless.
One *thinks*.
I also have a pair of glasses where the frame is broken, and sometimes the left lens pops out. As it just did.
And for all that my left eye seems/feels so very useless, it is completely disorienting when that happens.
@GeePawHill My favorite fact in that arena:
1) you feel simultaneous touches on a shoulder and a foot as simultaneous.
2a) Nerve impulses travel at a finite speed (generally speaking, 50-60 m/s is normal).
2b) The nerve pathway from foot to brain is several times longer than from shoulder to brain.
Given 2, 1 is impossible.
The brain *edits* your instantaneous memory in real time to make the impulses have arrived together.
*long drag on cigarette, slow exhale*
Yeah.
Back in caveman times, in the first grade, I had a school nurse trying to test my vision.
She thought I didn't know what an "E" was, or what it meant to ask "which way are the 'E's arms pointing".
I have worn glasses, not the magnifying kind, the smallifying kind, of visibly warped lenses, since I was 6 years old.
They told my mom that it would get better as I aged.
It *did*. I went from 13 diopters to 12.
Two privately asked questions here.
1) Why didn't your glaucoma get checked sooner?
2) Are you now taking glaucoma meds for your right eye?
1) It didn't get checked sooner cuz glaucoma is an invisible-to-the-owner illness, and puff tests are mandatory, but not medically compelling. In the US, an optemetrist charges you and arm and a leg for a prescription, and an opthamologist--the one you need for a glaucoma diagnosis--costs half a torso.
a) Uninsured for decades, I did not go see the opthamologist.
b) With such terrible vision to begin with, the left eye loss was the kind of thing one only notices very faintly.
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I find this fascinating.
Clearly, tho my left eye seems useless to me, it does not seem useless to my visual cortex. My *brain* is using that eye, even if my *mind* doesn't know it.
What we don't know, even about how our own bodies work, so totally dwarfs what we do know.