Yesterday I spent the day relaxing at home, spending a ton of time on my beloved technology. I think the entire day I was either staring at my phone, my iPad, or my laptop. So as the light started to fade outside and the phone started to blind me a bit, I thought it was just an adjustment issue. But when it didn’t go away, I started to get confused. One corner of the screen was so bright I couldn’t tell what was on it. Then when I looked over to my laptop, I noticed that I had a blind spot to part of the screen. I tried blinking it away, but there was no change.

As I started to notice a strange halo-ish glowing pulsing in the right peripheral of my vision, I tried to pinpoint where it was coming from. It felt like it was related to my right eye, but when I closed that eye and covered it with my hand, the brightness still made its way through my eyelid and caused the same pulsing glow. Looking out at things like the rooms of the home and the buildings outside made the effect less obvious, but I could see how small areas were distorted and jiggling. I thought I’d try a headstand since an inversion could bring more blood to my head and perhaps flush out the feeling (yeah, I wasn’t thinking straight). It didn’t change a thing.

I figured my eyes might be strained from all the technology, so I looked outside for awhile, but the blurred spots remained. I started to imagine what I could do… should I go see an optometrist? They wouldn’t still be open at 8 or so on a Sunday. Perhaps I should wait until the next day. What if it was still like that tomorrow? Would I be able to drive? Could my neighbor take me to the optometrist? Could I drive there slowly with my hazard lights on?

At that time, I started to get worried and really wished that Panda was around. I tried to look in the mirror to see if there was unusual movement with my eyes or something visible on them, but with my poor vision I couldn’t tell. I tried taking a video and playing it back, but that didn’t help either. Looking at any screen just didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. After about 20 minutes (and some pondering how life would be without my eyesight – or losing it in one eye), I went to go take my contacts off. They didn’t have anything on them, but soon after removing the right one from my eye and stumbling around trying to figure out where my glasses were, the effect went away. Was it related to my contacts or just coincidence in timing, that the effect faded just as I decided to finally try removing my contacts? Hard to say.

Today I put the same contacts back in and haven’t experienced any problems. I’ll be monitoring things closely to see if anything weird happens again. After all, nobody wats to go blind or have severely impaired vision, do they?