Category: History

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.

I was about to enter fifth grade and I had positive energy but before I could get them I needed to get the eye pressure test. I hated that blue light thing with a passion, my dad used to try to reassure me that I’d get a Burger King Whopper when it was done and they were really good back then. I was journaling back then so I might as well provide the original source material.

41 eye pressure in my right eye and 30 in my left. It is actually a miracle that there wasn’t vision loss.

Then came the drops. I hated them, particularly Phosphonline Iodide (this was the bad old days before Xalitan). Getting the old dialating drops as an infant and toddler was one of the least favorite things. Now I had to do it every day.

My spirit had not been broken yet at this time. My mom was even about to have my littlest sister!

I was just a run-of-the-mill unpopular seventh grader. Up to the second semester mark, things were pretty normal for me (Getting pushed around by bullies, trying to find anyone who would actually eat lunch with me, etc…). Then the classes switched. Instead of wood shop fourth hour, I had computers. I liked the thought of it, since I was better on a computer than on a bandsaw.

Well, we get into the computer room (this was way back when the school had Apple IIe’s) and my computer has something different than everybody else’s. I guess the person before me had forgotten to shut it off. So the teacher starts yelling at me. The class laughs. After that things moved smoothly for awhile. But then we started typing. I was not too good at typing to begin with, but my real problem was my bad vision. I put my face too close to the screen. The teacher then would grab me by the back of the neck, pull me further away from the screen, and tell me to start typing while the class watched and cackled. Then he would say I was stupid and point out that my relatives were all construction workers and they had bad breath (even though it was the wrong last name he was talking about, it was still pretty mean). This occurred for a few days. Then my parents called the school and he stopped doing it. Still, it did leave an impact.

Since age 1990 I had been on Phospholine Iodide which severely constricted my pupil so I couldn’t see very well in the dark. This month I finally got off it and went on Xalitan and my pressures were lower for it.

I didn’t get in to the college I wanted to get into. I visited Wheaton, Taylor, and Calvin and liked Taylor far and away the best. I was still wearing contacts and thin glasses then but for some reason I didn’t put my contacts in for the Taylor interview. I had spent the night in a dorm room of some cool guys but all they had for me to sleep on was a couch I was too tall for. I totally bombed the interview, even discussing how retro games from the Commodore 64 era were my passion. Not a lie but not something you say to try to get into a college.

Even though Taylor was technically easier to get into than Wheaton because my interview for Wheaton was so much better (as I had my contacts in and thin glasses), I got into the latter and not the former.

My vision is right on the bubble of being able to drive. I don’t have depth perception so can’t fit vehicles into narrow garages like we have now.

My senior year of high school, I used to drive the family burgundy van to a Baptist church south of us. Family members would be quiet and contemplative, preparing for the service. Or because they were scared for their lives.

My vision was too poor for me to see people coming down the road making a left turn onto a busy street. One of the only times driving on my own I went to some high school art show thing that had people from our rival school in it. I had to make a left turn on the way back and thank God I survived because I didn’t see anything but I heard someone’s breaks squeal.

Suffice it to say after that I didn’t drive any busy places on my own.

They say fashion is not a weapon; it is armor. I agree with them because for eight years I wore contacts and thin glasses and the world was a very different place for me. People bemoan my lack of “social skills,” but social interactions are a series of feedback loops, and when they start positively, there is a much higher chance of them remaining so. If you don’t look normal, every social interaction is like hitting a golf ball out of a sand trap. The fact that I was already struggling with depression meant I needed all the positivity I could get. I was lucky enough to look normal from 7th grade until the end of my sophomore year in college. Women liked me (though I didn’t really capitalize on that), and in college, I made friends and was accepted in a friend group for the first time in my entire life.

Then came the fleas. The cat had fleas and they were so bad that she sat on top of the refrigerator where my contacts happened to be. On August 20, 2000 I tried putting them in and my right one hurt. It was because of all the cat hair but it was the beginning of the end. My junior year of college I could no longer wear contacts and my life changed drastically because of it. I became a social pariah and women were almost completely off my radar.

For six months, things were relatively fine, but at the beginning of 2001, the dry eye got so bad that I was in pain most of the day. I was allergic to my glaucoma drops, and they were torpedoing the glands in my eyelids. All the while, I was going to college full-time and working part-time. I had to use my eyes looking at screens but that exacerbated the pain. I had a great team of doctors but they couldn’t find a fix by changing drops and finding preservative-free options.

This is something I drew on my computer a few months in. Being in chronic pain was one of my worst fears and now it had come true. I told people hell was pain because pain was hell, not the other way around.