What I Saw When I Could No Longer See I went blind on…
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What I Saw When I Could No Longer See
I went blind on Christmas Day. As much as I’d like to pin the blame on someone else, as much as I’d like to blame my father-in-law who complained nonstop about how dinner was going to be late, the buck stops with me. But, really, who knew that a not-fully-thawed turkey, too much oil, and propane turned up full-blast would act like a bomb? Jonah, my twelve-year-old, that’s who. While we waited for the ophthalmologist in the ED, I heard a YouTube video on my son’s phone, then heard him say to his mother, “Dad should’ve watched these before he tried it.”
Though I wanted to bark at him, I couldn’t disagree. I *should* have looked at deep-fry turkey disaster videos. Might have saved me sitting in an ED on Christmas, pressing my palms into my bandaged face wondering how the hell something could hurt so much.
“Turn that off, Jonah,” Rebecca said, then, to me, “is the pain medicine helping?”
“Yeah,” I lied. My wife, empathetic to a fault, didn’t deal well with sickness or injury.
By the time the ophthalmologist arrived an hour later, the second dose of Dilaudid had actually kicked in. My eyes and skin still seared from the worst pain of my life, but I didn’t care as much about it. I didn’t care when he sutured my eyelids shut. I didn’t care that Jonah was filming him suture my eyelids shut (“Put that away” Rebecca snapped). I did manage to care that the doctor said I wouldn’t be blind for long and that the sutures and bandages would come off in a week.
“Just seven days. I’m listening to *War And Peace* in the car. It’s like twenty hours. It’s very good.”
Armed with a prescription for Vicodin, my doctor’s audiobook recommendation, and Rebecca’s notes (she’s an A+ student, a copious note-taker), we left the emergency room.
“Thank God,” Rebecca said as she reached over me to start the seat warmer and gave me a peck on my lower cheek where the bandages ended. “No permanent damage.”
The way things turned out, permanent damage (eyes ripped from my head, visual cortex removed) would have been nice.
If there was anything good about my accident, it was the timing. There wasn’t much mortgage brokering being done the week between Christmas and New Year's, so my business wasn’t going to take a noticeable hit. I couldn’t help out around the house (bonus!) which meant Rebecca had a lot to do instead of worrying that the doctor was wrong and I would, in the end, be blind. She set me up on the couch in the living room so I could smell the Christmas tree. She made me lasagna. She didn’t serve any turkey.
At first, I didn’t think much of what I saw behind my closed lids. Hazy blobs and patterns, dancing patches of light and dark that coalesce into objects and silhouettes, like those after-images you get when you’ve been out in the sunlight and you squeeze your eyes shut. I had those. I chalked it up to the pain meds and—what did the Doc say?—the healing of my eyeballs. It was only a day after the “Bird Bomb” (Jonah’s title for the disaster) so I thought *no big deal*.
At first.
By the next day, the silhouettes weren’t acting right. They were no longer random shape-shifting blobs. They would track through my visual field, track like they had their own lives. I followed the shape of Rebecca as she walked out the front door to return a Christmas gift. And when Jonah’s heavy footfalls woke me from a nap, I saw his shape traverse the hallway at the top of the stairs. It was as if some signal was getting through my stitched-shut eyelids and inch-thick bandages. But I wasn’t getting any signal from the big window in the living room, no signal from the Christmas lights on the tree. Nothing but those moving forms.
“Hey Siri, call Jonah.”
Siri did what she was told. Jonah picked up. “What, dad?”
“I need you to empty my bedpan.” I waited for a chuckle, got none, then plowed on. “Seriously, could you fill up my water bottle?”
“Why didn’t you ask me when I was down there?”
“I still had water when you were down here.”
He *ugh‘ed* but, dutiful son he is, hopped to it. I heard his door open upstairs, heard his feet in the hallway. I drained my giant Stanley tumbler and turned my head to the stairway. There it was: the silhouette gliding downward through space. I couldn’t see the stairs or the string lights on the bannister, just Jonah’s moving form.
Trying to describe what I saw as he approached me is difficult. He looked like a blown-out black and white video image where the whites are too white and the darks have fuzzy edges bleeding one into the other. Except there was no white. He was more dark on a dark background, moving through space
“Dad, you’re creeping me out, watching me like that.”
He floated around to the refrigerator, began to fill the cup. Even though my eyes couldn’t technically see, I couldn’t take them off him.
“I’m not watching you. I can’t see, remember?” I tried to laugh at the incomprehensibility of it: I shouldn’t have been able to see anything, and yet I was.
But what did I know? I was the guy who plopped a half-frozen turkey into boiling oil. I thought about asking Jonah to do a search on ghost images or somesuch but then he’d start to worry I was going nuts and tell his mom, who would really worry I was going nuts. Nobody needed that.
He approached me and reached out his arm, which looked insectoid and angled in all the wrong places. There was no cup in the hand that I could see but I heard the Stanley clunk on the coffee table.
“Thanks.”
The insect-arm retracted. The shape stood there, a few feet from me. His head was giant, much larger than Jonah’s actual head, atop a spindly neck. Set in the middle of the dark blob of face, I thought I saw a flash of white. Teeth, they looked like. Pointed teeth. Like fangs.
Reflexively, I jerked back. My foot kicked the coffee table and the Stanley banged to the ground. “Oh, shoot, I’m sorry,” I blabbered.
“S’okay. The lid was on.” As he bent down to pick it off the floor I saw what looked like spines coming out of his back, like spikes on the dinosaurs that Jonah used to obsess over.
I sucked a frightened, kidlike breath.
“You’re freaking me out,” he said. His pointed white teeth—fangs, might as well call them what they were—flashed.
“I’m freaked out because I can’t see my kid,” I tried again to laugh, but the weak sound caught in my throat.
That enormous black blob of a head nodded. As he left, I saw the ends of his hands were talons.
By the next day, I couldn’t deal with the images any longer. The only time I’d let anyone enter the bedroom was to drop off food and water. Despite my best efforts to act normally, Rebecca was spiraling into her empath hellhole. I kept my back to her when she entered the room with a sandwich, or a plate of cut-up steak, none of which I touched. I didn’t want to eat anything cooked up by the creature that placed the tray on the night stand: a squat, gray, slimy thing with dozens of tooth-filled mouths that covered her head, her chest, her arms. When she spoke, each of the mouths moved. Even her eyes were ringed with teeth.
“I’m worried you’re not eating,” she said. My eyes were fixed on the far wall; they saw nothing but a black screen. “Ryan, I said I’m worried you’re not—”
“I heard you,” I said. “I’m not eating because the pain meds mean I haven’t taken a dump in three days. And I’m depressed. With all this, I can be depressed, can’t I?”
“Sure,” she said quietly as she closed the door.
When she settled into bed that evening, I turned my head away from her and into my pillow. Even so, as she leaned over to kiss me, I saw in my peripheral “vision” those mouths puckering and sucking.
She said, “I love your sweetmeats.”
“What?”
“I said I love you, sweetie.”
I got my courage together and risked a glance at her. The mouths leered. They smacked open and closed. I thought I caught a whiff of rotting meat.
Later, the shape that should have been Jonah sat in a chair across the room from my bed. He’d offered to look up things for me on his laptop. He thought it might help. Like I said, he’s a dutiful son. A good kid.
Letting him in there, letting him sit that close to me, that was a mistake.
His fanged mouth seemed to stretch from one bat-ear to the other, the jaw clicked audibly when he talked. His arms were double-jointed. His skin was jet black and covered in oozing boils. He, like his mother, stank.
“Here’s something,” he said. “Sometimes when you go blind your visual cortex can become excitable and,” he slowed down, “dis-in-hib-it-ed.” My twelve-year-old, I thought, working his lips over an unfamiliar word. Still my twelve-year-old, thank God.
Then Jonah-not-Jonah lifted his oozing, giant head. “But it says you see clear images. I thought you said you’re just seeing shapes.”
“I am,” I lied. “It’s probably some version of the same thing, the whole visual-cortex-excitable thing.’
“And this is cool: it says neighboring neurons from auditory or somato-sensory areas can invade the visual cortex.”
“Yeah, supercool.” Understanding how the visual cortex criss-crossed with the other parts of my brain was above my pay grade. “Anyway, thanks, J. I need to sleep a bit.” *And not see you, not smell you*. “Go play a video game or something.”
“Catcha later.”
There was something wrong with his voice. A gutteral, metallic undertone.
*I am losing my mind*, I thought. *First the eyes, now the ears.*
“Jonah,” I said. Jonah-not-Jonah stopped at the door.
“What?”
Still that same growl. My mouth went dry.
“Remember not to tell your mom I’m seeing shapes, okay? She’s worried enough.”
“I’m not worried, though,” he growled as he walked through the doorway, “because I’m going to rip you apart and feast on your—”
The door closed. My eyes tried to widen but the sutures held tight and sent stabs of pain through my lids.
A terrifying thought stabbed into my brain: *Not Jonah*. *That thing is not my son.*
I didn’t let either of them into the bedroom again. The Rebecca *thing* left food and Gatorade outside the door. I listened to its concern:
*This really isn’t normal, Ryan.*
Its worry sounded convincing. But after it finished fussing over me, I could hear its voice, like the sound of grinding gears: *I’m going to gorge on your soft parts. I’m going to slake my thirst with your blood.*
Yes, I knew I was hallucinating. Both auditory and visual and, when I got close enough to them, olfactory. I got better at using Siri and Chat GPT’s voice function. You learn a lot when you’re alone in your bedroom with nothing but an iPhone. I learned to talk like a doctor (visual, auditory, olfactory). I learned about neuroplasticity. I learned about Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
This information should have been a comfort to me and it was, to a point. But when Jonah (thing) and Rebecca (thing) scraped along the hallway muttering in their awful voices, I wasn’t so comforted. I was terrified by them and terrified by the conviction that I was going insane.
But—and this was the most comforting—my insanity wouldn’t last long. One thing my research told me was that, once the sutures were removed, light would hit my retinas, my optic nerves would fire, and my visual cortex would reset. It would stop getting confused by sounds and smells. It would stop confusing the other parts of my brain.
December 31st!
Suture removal!
The restoration of normalcy!
I open the bedroom door. In the hallway stand both Rebecca and Jonah (I’d been forcing myself to think of them as Rebecca and Jonah, my wife and kid who were definitely not *things*, not *monsters*). When I see them, though, I gasp and try to cover it with a cough. They (my Jonah, my Rebecca) have grown larger and more grotesque. Jonah stands two feet above me, his multi-jointed arms flicking this way and that. The boils on his midnight-black skin have burst; small white worms wriggle out of the holes and drop like rain onto the ground. Rebecca has ballooned to the width of the hallway itself (impossible). The many mouths over her body are chattering and clacking their teeth. The stench of decay fills my nostrils.
As much as I try, I can’t think of these things as my family. I can’t close my eyes and not see them. I can’t not *hear* them. Not *smell* them.
Impossibly, the giant creatures are able to fit themselves in the car. The smell makes me gag so I open the window. The Rebecca monster says it’s thirty degrees out and asks whether I feel feverish, but I don’t answer. It takes every effort for me not to fling open the car door and jump from the vehicle.
We trudge across the clinic’s parking lot, the monsters at my side chattering away and stinking to high heaven. I keep silent. *Thirty more minutes*, I think, *maybe twenty if I’m lucky, maybe ten*.
I hear other people in the lobby of the building, but don’t see any shapes. I feel relieved. The world outside is normal. It’s only because I’ve been cooped up with my family that I’m seeing them like this.
Other voices chitchat comfortably in the waiting room. I focus on them and not on the grating chatter from the things sitting next to me.
*Just a few more minutes.*
The office is efficient and we are taken into an exam room. We sit in silence. I look at my lap, but I can still smell them.
The door to the exam room opens.
“How’d it go?” the doctor asks in a clear, human voice. He makes no comment about the monsters in the room, no comment about the smell.
“Honestly, a bit rougher than I thought it’d be.”
“Pain?”
“More that my mind started playing tricks on me. Sounds a bit crazy probably.”
“Not really,” the doctor says and, again, relief floods me. As he peels off the bandages, he goes on about visual stimuli and cortices, all things I know from my time with Chat GPT.
For the first time since my accident, I am relaxed and uncoiled. When the bandages come off, I can see light (real light) coming in through my lids.
“Alicia,” the doctor says to the nurse, “lower the lights please.” From behind my lids, I can see the lights dim.
“Ready?” the doctor asks, “This can sting a bit.”
I feel a tug on my left lid, hear a snip, then feel a sting. I keep my left eye closed until I feel the same on my right.
“Okay then, open sesame!” the doctor says. When I don’t open, he leans in close and says, “Ryan, you good? Open your eyes, please.”
I do. The light, even though dim, hurts my eyes. The doctor is close enough to kiss me; his blurry face fills my visual field.
“Blink a few times for me,” the doctor says.
I follow orders and, after a few blinks, he comes into focus. Normal features. Normal human.
The sigh I give contains more joy than I’ve ever felt before.
“Looks good,” he says, smiling and straightening his back. “We’ll just need to do a couple of tests to—”
A scream—mine—cuts him off. Behind the doctor, against the wall of the exam room, stands my family. One is eight feet tall with worms crawling out of its skin. The other a stinking blob of flesh, each of its many mouths grinning.
#entertainment
source
I went blind on Christmas Day. As much as I’d like to pin the blame on someone else, as much as I’d like to blame my father-in-law who complained nonstop about how dinner was going to be late, the buck stops with me. But, really, who knew that a not-fully-thawed turkey, too much oil, and propane turned up full-blast would act like a bomb? Jonah, my twelve-year-old, that’s who. While we waited for the ophthalmologist in the ED, I heard a YouTube video on my son’s phone, then heard him say to his mother, “Dad should’ve watched these before he tried it.”
Though I wanted to bark at him, I couldn’t disagree. I *should* have looked at deep-fry turkey disaster videos. Might have saved me sitting in an ED on Christmas, pressing my palms into my bandaged face wondering how the hell something could hurt so much.
“Turn that off, Jonah,” Rebecca said, then, to me, “is the pain medicine helping?”
“Yeah,” I lied. My wife, empathetic to a fault, didn’t deal well with sickness or injury.
By the time the ophthalmologist arrived an hour later, the second dose of Dilaudid had actually kicked in. My eyes and skin still seared from the worst pain of my life, but I didn’t care as much about it. I didn’t care when he sutured my eyelids shut. I didn’t care that Jonah was filming him suture my eyelids shut (“Put that away” Rebecca snapped). I did manage to care that the doctor said I wouldn’t be blind for long and that the sutures and bandages would come off in a week.
“Just seven days. I’m listening to *War And Peace* in the car. It’s like twenty hours. It’s very good.”
Armed with a prescription for Vicodin, my doctor’s audiobook recommendation, and Rebecca’s notes (she’s an A+ student, a copious note-taker), we left the emergency room.
“Thank God,” Rebecca said as she reached over me to start the seat warmer and gave me a peck on my lower cheek where the bandages ended. “No permanent damage.”
The way things turned out, permanent damage (eyes ripped from my head, visual cortex removed) would have been nice.
If there was anything good about my accident, it was the timing. There wasn’t much mortgage brokering being done the week between Christmas and New Year's, so my business wasn’t going to take a noticeable hit. I couldn’t help out around the house (bonus!) which meant Rebecca had a lot to do instead of worrying that the doctor was wrong and I would, in the end, be blind. She set me up on the couch in the living room so I could smell the Christmas tree. She made me lasagna. She didn’t serve any turkey.
At first, I didn’t think much of what I saw behind my closed lids. Hazy blobs and patterns, dancing patches of light and dark that coalesce into objects and silhouettes, like those after-images you get when you’ve been out in the sunlight and you squeeze your eyes shut. I had those. I chalked it up to the pain meds and—what did the Doc say?—the healing of my eyeballs. It was only a day after the “Bird Bomb” (Jonah’s title for the disaster) so I thought *no big deal*.
At first.
By the next day, the silhouettes weren’t acting right. They were no longer random shape-shifting blobs. They would track through my visual field, track like they had their own lives. I followed the shape of Rebecca as she walked out the front door to return a Christmas gift. And when Jonah’s heavy footfalls woke me from a nap, I saw his shape traverse the hallway at the top of the stairs. It was as if some signal was getting through my stitched-shut eyelids and inch-thick bandages. But I wasn’t getting any signal from the big window in the living room, no signal from the Christmas lights on the tree. Nothing but those moving forms.
“Hey Siri, call Jonah.”
Siri did what she was told. Jonah picked up. “What, dad?”
“I need you to empty my bedpan.” I waited for a chuckle, got none, then plowed on. “Seriously, could you fill up my water bottle?”
“Why didn’t you ask me when I was down there?”
“I still had water when you were down here.”
He *ugh‘ed* but, dutiful son he is, hopped to it. I heard his door open upstairs, heard his feet in the hallway. I drained my giant Stanley tumbler and turned my head to the stairway. There it was: the silhouette gliding downward through space. I couldn’t see the stairs or the string lights on the bannister, just Jonah’s moving form.
Trying to describe what I saw as he approached me is difficult. He looked like a blown-out black and white video image where the whites are too white and the darks have fuzzy edges bleeding one into the other. Except there was no white. He was more dark on a dark background, moving through space
“Dad, you’re creeping me out, watching me like that.”
He floated around to the refrigerator, began to fill the cup. Even though my eyes couldn’t technically see, I couldn’t take them off him.
“I’m not watching you. I can’t see, remember?” I tried to laugh at the incomprehensibility of it: I shouldn’t have been able to see anything, and yet I was.
But what did I know? I was the guy who plopped a half-frozen turkey into boiling oil. I thought about asking Jonah to do a search on ghost images or somesuch but then he’d start to worry I was going nuts and tell his mom, who would really worry I was going nuts. Nobody needed that.
He approached me and reached out his arm, which looked insectoid and angled in all the wrong places. There was no cup in the hand that I could see but I heard the Stanley clunk on the coffee table.
“Thanks.”
The insect-arm retracted. The shape stood there, a few feet from me. His head was giant, much larger than Jonah’s actual head, atop a spindly neck. Set in the middle of the dark blob of face, I thought I saw a flash of white. Teeth, they looked like. Pointed teeth. Like fangs.
Reflexively, I jerked back. My foot kicked the coffee table and the Stanley banged to the ground. “Oh, shoot, I’m sorry,” I blabbered.
“S’okay. The lid was on.” As he bent down to pick it off the floor I saw what looked like spines coming out of his back, like spikes on the dinosaurs that Jonah used to obsess over.
I sucked a frightened, kidlike breath.
“You’re freaking me out,” he said. His pointed white teeth—fangs, might as well call them what they were—flashed.
“I’m freaked out because I can’t see my kid,” I tried again to laugh, but the weak sound caught in my throat.
That enormous black blob of a head nodded. As he left, I saw the ends of his hands were talons.
By the next day, I couldn’t deal with the images any longer. The only time I’d let anyone enter the bedroom was to drop off food and water. Despite my best efforts to act normally, Rebecca was spiraling into her empath hellhole. I kept my back to her when she entered the room with a sandwich, or a plate of cut-up steak, none of which I touched. I didn’t want to eat anything cooked up by the creature that placed the tray on the night stand: a squat, gray, slimy thing with dozens of tooth-filled mouths that covered her head, her chest, her arms. When she spoke, each of the mouths moved. Even her eyes were ringed with teeth.
“I’m worried you’re not eating,” she said. My eyes were fixed on the far wall; they saw nothing but a black screen. “Ryan, I said I’m worried you’re not—”
“I heard you,” I said. “I’m not eating because the pain meds mean I haven’t taken a dump in three days. And I’m depressed. With all this, I can be depressed, can’t I?”
“Sure,” she said quietly as she closed the door.
When she settled into bed that evening, I turned my head away from her and into my pillow. Even so, as she leaned over to kiss me, I saw in my peripheral “vision” those mouths puckering and sucking.
She said, “I love your sweetmeats.”
“What?”
“I said I love you, sweetie.”
I got my courage together and risked a glance at her. The mouths leered. They smacked open and closed. I thought I caught a whiff of rotting meat.
Later, the shape that should have been Jonah sat in a chair across the room from my bed. He’d offered to look up things for me on his laptop. He thought it might help. Like I said, he’s a dutiful son. A good kid.
Letting him in there, letting him sit that close to me, that was a mistake.
His fanged mouth seemed to stretch from one bat-ear to the other, the jaw clicked audibly when he talked. His arms were double-jointed. His skin was jet black and covered in oozing boils. He, like his mother, stank.
“Here’s something,” he said. “Sometimes when you go blind your visual cortex can become excitable and,” he slowed down, “dis-in-hib-it-ed.” My twelve-year-old, I thought, working his lips over an unfamiliar word. Still my twelve-year-old, thank God.
Then Jonah-not-Jonah lifted his oozing, giant head. “But it says you see clear images. I thought you said you’re just seeing shapes.”
“I am,” I lied. “It’s probably some version of the same thing, the whole visual-cortex-excitable thing.’
“And this is cool: it says neighboring neurons from auditory or somato-sensory areas can invade the visual cortex.”
“Yeah, supercool.” Understanding how the visual cortex criss-crossed with the other parts of my brain was above my pay grade. “Anyway, thanks, J. I need to sleep a bit.” *And not see you, not smell you*. “Go play a video game or something.”
“Catcha later.”
There was something wrong with his voice. A gutteral, metallic undertone.
*I am losing my mind*, I thought. *First the eyes, now the ears.*
“Jonah,” I said. Jonah-not-Jonah stopped at the door.
“What?”
Still that same growl. My mouth went dry.
“Remember not to tell your mom I’m seeing shapes, okay? She’s worried enough.”
“I’m not worried, though,” he growled as he walked through the doorway, “because I’m going to rip you apart and feast on your—”
The door closed. My eyes tried to widen but the sutures held tight and sent stabs of pain through my lids.
A terrifying thought stabbed into my brain: *Not Jonah*. *That thing is not my son.*
I didn’t let either of them into the bedroom again. The Rebecca *thing* left food and Gatorade outside the door. I listened to its concern:
*This really isn’t normal, Ryan.*
Its worry sounded convincing. But after it finished fussing over me, I could hear its voice, like the sound of grinding gears: *I’m going to gorge on your soft parts. I’m going to slake my thirst with your blood.*
Yes, I knew I was hallucinating. Both auditory and visual and, when I got close enough to them, olfactory. I got better at using Siri and Chat GPT’s voice function. You learn a lot when you’re alone in your bedroom with nothing but an iPhone. I learned to talk like a doctor (visual, auditory, olfactory). I learned about neuroplasticity. I learned about Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
This information should have been a comfort to me and it was, to a point. But when Jonah (thing) and Rebecca (thing) scraped along the hallway muttering in their awful voices, I wasn’t so comforted. I was terrified by them and terrified by the conviction that I was going insane.
But—and this was the most comforting—my insanity wouldn’t last long. One thing my research told me was that, once the sutures were removed, light would hit my retinas, my optic nerves would fire, and my visual cortex would reset. It would stop getting confused by sounds and smells. It would stop confusing the other parts of my brain.
December 31st!
Suture removal!
The restoration of normalcy!
I open the bedroom door. In the hallway stand both Rebecca and Jonah (I’d been forcing myself to think of them as Rebecca and Jonah, my wife and kid who were definitely not *things*, not *monsters*). When I see them, though, I gasp and try to cover it with a cough. They (my Jonah, my Rebecca) have grown larger and more grotesque. Jonah stands two feet above me, his multi-jointed arms flicking this way and that. The boils on his midnight-black skin have burst; small white worms wriggle out of the holes and drop like rain onto the ground. Rebecca has ballooned to the width of the hallway itself (impossible). The many mouths over her body are chattering and clacking their teeth. The stench of decay fills my nostrils.
As much as I try, I can’t think of these things as my family. I can’t close my eyes and not see them. I can’t not *hear* them. Not *smell* them.
Impossibly, the giant creatures are able to fit themselves in the car. The smell makes me gag so I open the window. The Rebecca monster says it’s thirty degrees out and asks whether I feel feverish, but I don’t answer. It takes every effort for me not to fling open the car door and jump from the vehicle.
We trudge across the clinic’s parking lot, the monsters at my side chattering away and stinking to high heaven. I keep silent. *Thirty more minutes*, I think, *maybe twenty if I’m lucky, maybe ten*.
I hear other people in the lobby of the building, but don’t see any shapes. I feel relieved. The world outside is normal. It’s only because I’ve been cooped up with my family that I’m seeing them like this.
Other voices chitchat comfortably in the waiting room. I focus on them and not on the grating chatter from the things sitting next to me.
*Just a few more minutes.*
The office is efficient and we are taken into an exam room. We sit in silence. I look at my lap, but I can still smell them.
The door to the exam room opens.
“How’d it go?” the doctor asks in a clear, human voice. He makes no comment about the monsters in the room, no comment about the smell.
“Honestly, a bit rougher than I thought it’d be.”
“Pain?”
“More that my mind started playing tricks on me. Sounds a bit crazy probably.”
“Not really,” the doctor says and, again, relief floods me. As he peels off the bandages, he goes on about visual stimuli and cortices, all things I know from my time with Chat GPT.
For the first time since my accident, I am relaxed and uncoiled. When the bandages come off, I can see light (real light) coming in through my lids.
“Alicia,” the doctor says to the nurse, “lower the lights please.” From behind my lids, I can see the lights dim.
“Ready?” the doctor asks, “This can sting a bit.”
I feel a tug on my left lid, hear a snip, then feel a sting. I keep my left eye closed until I feel the same on my right.
“Okay then, open sesame!” the doctor says. When I don’t open, he leans in close and says, “Ryan, you good? Open your eyes, please.”
I do. The light, even though dim, hurts my eyes. The doctor is close enough to kiss me; his blurry face fills my visual field.
“Blink a few times for me,” the doctor says.
I follow orders and, after a few blinks, he comes into focus. Normal features. Normal human.
The sigh I give contains more joy than I’ve ever felt before.
“Looks good,” he says, smiling and straightening his back. “We’ll just need to do a couple of tests to—”
A scream—mine—cuts him off. Behind the doctor, against the wall of the exam room, stands my family. One is eight feet tall with worms crawling out of its skin. The other a stinking blob of flesh, each of its many mouths grinning.
#entertainment
source
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