When the doctor(s) in the ICU came to tell me about my vision loss, I didn’t really care. Part of that indifference was surely due to the plethora of drugs sedating me, but it’s also likely because I didn’t really care about anything at that time beyond no one else shoving tubes down my throat.

I would care a whole lot more about my vision (or lack thereof) in the months to follow.

While I’d had four ischemic strokes, the two larger ones that the doctors said they were worried about were in the parts of the brain controlling my vision and the left part of my body.
The official term doctors and therapists kept saying to me regarding my sight was “hononymous hemianopia”, which is basically a fancy way of saying that even though my eyes themselves are not damaged, my brain no longer processes input from the same half of both eyes (the left halves, in my case). It’s a condition that there is no scientifically-accepted treatment, medicine or surgery for and a wholly negative prognosis.

I’ve attached my actual vision field test results from November 2021 to this post. The black areas are the parts of my eyes that test as blind.

This vision loss is infinitely more disabling than I expected at first, and it’s taken me over two months to even start to comprehend what’s happened to my vision and what it means. You might think I could just stick a badass eyepatch over my left eye like Carl Grimes to “block” my lost vision and be good to go, but it just doesn’t work that way. Because of the baffling way that human eyesight works, those left halves no longer functioning meant that I suddenly had complete loss of all of my peripheral vision on the left side and a huge, persistent blur added to my central vision (particularly the left side of the center, since central vision is made up of the good right half of my left eye and the blind left half of my right eye). There’s also dark shadows and dots and blocks that move around in my “working” visual field, which the opthamologist said is my brain trying to cope with the damage. This basically amounts to more than half of my whole vision field being completely fucked.

I thought maybe I could be double the badass and get a pair of half-eyepatches, but apparently that was a poorly-conceived notion.

It’s virtually impossible for me to describe what my post-strokes eyesight is like to someone not experiencing it. The best comparison I can make is to when you put on a cumbersome Halloween mask or helmet and realize you can only see out through limited eye holes in front. And then, take that restricted vision and imagine that the paparazzi runs up and uses dozens of high-powered flashes right in your face, so that the field of vision you do have unobscured is covered in moving, flashing spots of light that never go away.
Yeah, my new vision is like that—but worse and more complicated.

The large stroke to my occipital lobe was large enough that I have visual processing problems on top of the hemianopsia double vision, increased light sensitivity, contrast sensitivity and inability to track multiple objects with my eyes are some of the symptoms that have arisen from the visual processing damage.
There’s lots of crazy oddball stuff I’ve experienced as well. For the first several weeks I was awake, things I’ve seen thousands of times and can clearly picture in my mind’s eye looked very bizarre. The Pokémon sprites in Pokémon Go, for example, looked ultra angular as if they were made out of Minecraft blocks for weeks.

In addition, a layer of pixelation-like static (sometimes called “visual snow”) covers up the remaining usual field I do have. It makes it extremely difficult to process what is in front of me, particularly drawings or photos. Watching TV is also challenging for anything beyond slow-moving sitcoms and talking heads shows. Reading comics is an ordeal since my brain cuts off the leftmost words in bubbles and I have to puzzle out what’s happening in the artwork based on colors, shapes and contextual clues.

Perhaps most distressing is my inability to play video games where things or characters move around. My once-formidable Super Smash Bros skills have devolved to the point where Level 1 CPUs thrash me severely because my brain can’t keep up at all and the characters literally blink out of existence for me while I repeatedly and unwittingly self-destruct. I am a ruined shell of my former gaming self.

I have never attempted to drive since my strokes, since my license would be taken away even if I didn’t die (which I surely would).

Just typing up simple blog entries like this one is an arduous, tiring challenge that uses every iota of my willpower since the left half of my phone screen is blurred over no matter how I be position my phone, white space between lines and words is difficult to perceive, and I hit the wrong letters on the keyboard constantly since even the keys that aren’t covered in shadows split and move around in my pixelated, doubled vision.

The Harvard-graduated neuro-ophthalmologist I saw a few weeks ago said it was not a positive sign that my vision hadn’t improved in the two months since the strokes, and I had a roughly 0% chance of recovery, putting a number to and reinforcing what every previous doctor, nurse and therapist had told me. And so, I’ve been seeking out questionable alternative treatments and more opinions.

Luckily, I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Naruto and spent dozens of times that amount thinking about it. I also endured at least three years of pure garbage Naruto filler episodes. I don’t give up.