I was born blind. I had bilateral congenital cataracts. It was the first seriously sad thing that happened to anyone on my mom’s side of the family (the Befuses who are all good Christians). They found this out at three days when they showed a light in my eyes and I didn’t react to it the way a normal newborn would.
Cataracts are what old people get. However they are much more serious when one gets them at birth because the clock is ticking when one is a baby; every successive month of blindness as an infant means poorer or even no vision as an adult (assuming they can fix it at a later date). This is because the infant brain is making connections like crazy and is learning to see. The eye is just a ateway to the brain, all the heavy lifting is done after the signal gets to the brain. So not giving the brain the opportunity to learn to see when it’s at is highest plasticity is devastating. I was a big baby and that worked in my favor. They could do the surgery at three months instead of six. The first three months of my life I only saw light and darkness.
Then they did cataract surgery. They had to give me general anesthesia and even had me on a ventilator. The surgery was done at the Eye and Ear Infirmary in downtown Chicago. They said they did the surgery in such a way that when I stopped growing I could get a lens implanted that would give me good enough vision that I wouldn’t need contacts, probably just thin glasses (in early 2001 my eye doctor found out they doctor didn’t actually do it the correct way—he didn’t leave some of the tissue there so a lens could “hang” on it). After surgery they fitted me with very thick glasses (I believe the power was that of a magnifying glass). I saw poorly but did see well enough that I could learn to read when I came of the age to do that.
I had adventurous parents. Within a few months of the surgery we moved to Tegocigelpa Honduras where my dad was a pastor of the Union Church there (basically a church for ex‐pats and English‐speaking military people). The church paid to have my fly back to the states every six months to get eye checkups. I bring this up because my relationship with the church started off as a positive note even if I wasn’t old enough to know it. Congenital cataracts are a very rare condition; someone on Reddit did an AMA (basically an online interview) on it. I’ve never met someone with the condition though. I know younger people who have it have done better than me (even driving) because obviously technology has improved since 1980 when I was born. They now sometimes give babies contacts (don’t know how that works) and that makes them see better in those crucial infant years.
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