It's What Colour?

I always felt so badly for Michael because he is colour-blind. As a painter, I appreciated the extraordinary array of colours that exist, and felt guilty that he misses out on that (the gene for colour blindness passes down through the mother). As a little boy, Michael would get excited when the leaves on the trees turned from green to yellow because yellow is one colour he can see accurately. I would put myself in his shoes by trying to imagine a colour that I'd never seen before - try it - it's not easy. So how could I possibly describe red, green, gold, pink, orange, or turquoise to him? He assured me that it really didn't matter because he couldn't miss what he'd never seen. I got a taste of what he meant recently when I began tutoring for Links To Learning: As the administrator showed me around she said I could set up at one of the green tables. I looked at the room full of gray tables and asked, "Which ones?" "The green ones," she replied. I felt like an idiot as I slowly said,"I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean." She looked at me for a minute, and then it dawned on me. "What colour are those tables?" I asked. "Green, "she said kindly. "What colour do you think they look like?" Now I know from being tested that I've lost some colour vision on the low end of the spectrum. And I sometimes have to ask Stan if something is blue or purple. However, now I'm wondering how often I get the colour wrong and don't know it. But like Michael said, it doesn't matter - I can't miss what I don't see.

Still here ...

After I very long hiatus I am back ... It's a little hard to explain my absence, but I guess to put it simply, I had a crisis in confidence about my vision loss. When trying to apply for a tax deduction over a year ago, I discovered that, according to the Canadian Government, I no longer qualified as "legally blind". The person who told me this was my eye doctor - and he was quite rude about it and all but accused me of trying to rip off the government. Even after he admitted that there are no tests to measure the effects of my optic nerve damage and how my brain interprets the scrambled signals it receives, I left his office feeling like a fraud. And in the typical way that I react to humiliation, I withdrew. I decided that since he said I wasn't "blind" then I wasn't. I didn't renew my CNIB card, and I stopped using my white cane. Which meant that I had difficulty getting around safely. So I stopped venturing out on my own. And I stopped blogging. Utter stupidity, I know. But still having issues with high inner ocular pressure in my eyes, I was forced to see another doctor. After the whole battery of tests he validated my description of the way I see. He agreed that there is no way to test it at this point, but that what I described is very much how other patients with optic nerve damage describe their vision. Unfortunately for me, the government uses such a narrow method of defining vision impairment that I don't qualify for any help. Thankfully, we can afford hundreds of dollars for a new computer and assistive software because otherwise I'd be SOL. This also begs the question of how I qualified in the first place; my neuro-ophthalmologist at Toronto Western Hospital understands the brain's function in vision, and referred me to the CNIB when I was discharged from his care back in 2005. Anyway, I stopped being stubborn and started using my mobility cane again. And I'm back to blogging.