Losing My Mind's Eye
Standard outpatient procedure turned stroke, peripheral vision deficit and an unnamed loss of visualization. My mind’s eye was erased.
5 min read
What It's Like Losing My Mind's Eye
In the winter of 1997, I was a healthy but stretched-too-thin working mother with a job in Washington, DC, a husband, and two young children. I had an epiphany that maybe I should be doing just one job, taking care of my kids, and my husband could take care of us. Long story short...I quit my job with visions of a “soccer mom” floating in my head, and less than six months later had a stroke. I lost part of my peripheral vision and, for the purposes of this story, lost my ability to visualize anything. This is what it's like losing my mind's eye. Apparently, during what should have been a somewhat routine outpatient procedure to perform a uterine artery embolization for some troublesome fibroid tumours, I lost a lot of blood and blood pressure resulting in the right occipital infarction or stroke. In the immediate aftermath, I was puzzled as to why I could not see the left side of the room. Then I was intrigued by the constant reel of images playing in my head. Later I was troubled by my inability to read the cards sent by friends when the letters of the alphabet meant nothing to me. It seems that in addition to the peripheral vision loss I suffered, I no longer had any stored visual memories nor the ability to create new ones. It would be almost 20 years later until I learned that I had joined a rather exclusive group of people living with acquired
