Perhaps the biggest problem I have with my vision is called visual simultagnosia. When I look at something, I experience it very differently than before. Instead of seeing everything at once, I see only one small piece of the whole at a time. I don’t see a face as a whole, but I see an eye, a nose, a mouth. I see them all, but I can’t keep them in my head at the same time. The image never comes together to form a whole. I had no name for it during the first weeks of my rehabilitation. The diagnosis was finally made in November, eight months after the stroke. Meanwhile, I searched in vain for a way to explain it that would be intelligible to others. I still think “”a glimpse”” is my best attempt at that explanation, though my wife is not very happy with it!
UZ Gasthuisberg, March 2017
You won’t hear me say it often, and please don’t misunderstand me when I say I always loved looking at the girls.
To me, there is nothing more beautiful in all of God’s creation than that very specific interplay of line, shape, color, light, shadow, structure and balance. The human face is not without reason the subject of countless works of art. And I wonder: how is it even possible that we can catch so much beauty in a single glance?
It has been three weeks since my stroke, and in those three weeks I have got to know many pretty girls. You tend to find them in a hospital. That’s how I got to know my wife once upon a time, though I wasn’t a patient then!
But now, perhaps my biggest problem is that I can no longer catch everything in one glimpse. Every day I do exercises designed to teach my brain new strategies to work around it. So please don’t call me a pervert when I tell youI’m sorry I can’t look at the girls in the same way I used to!
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