In 2008, I was going through one of the most difficult periods of my life. I had been working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I suddenly went blind. One minute I was serving a martini; the next, large black blobs were floating across my peripheral vision. Then, over the next few hours, I was plunged into total darkness.
I have had a chronic eye condition since I was three years old: uveitis, which causes inflammation inside the eye, and secondary glaucoma, which involves damage to the optic nerve. In my mid-teens, I lost sight in my left eye; now, at 21 years old, the right eye had followed suit. To add insult to injury, the recession had kicked in, leaving me skint and unemployed. I was forced to move out of London, the city I adored, and back in with my family in Berkshire. Losing my independence just after I graduated from university hadn’t been part of the plan.
The doctors didn’t know why my right eye had failed. They tried several treatments and I was waiting to see, for want of a better word, if the latest one would work. I’d already had a steroid injection into the back of my eye, which proved fruitless. I was then prescribed a huge dose of oral steroids – and if they didn’t work, my future options appeared limited. I had no idea if I would ever be able to see again. I was envious that all my friends were moving forward with their lives: new relationships, new jobs, travelling. Everything I had thought my life was going to be had changed and my future felt like it was no longer in my own hands.
Within a few weeks, I went from being a confident, outgoing twentysomething to gloomy and bad-tempered. I became full of spite and distrust, lashing out at everyone and everything. One Tuesday afternoon, about a month after I had gone blind at work, I was sitting in the living room and feeling as if I couldn’t face the day any more, so I returned to bed. I lay down and cried for the millionth time that day.
My mum came to check if I was OK. She couldn’t stand to see me in such distress but she didn’t know what to say. Other people would reel off motivational platitudes such as “Everything happens for a reason” or “It’s not the end, it’s just the beginning” – but my mum knew they would hold no sway with me.
My older brother, Sam, brought me a glass of water but before I could take a sip, my mum snatched it away, yelling: “Oh, for goodness sake!” “What is it?” I asked. “It’s not water,” she replied. “It’s an empty glass with a spider in it.”
Sam had long been a prankster, so this latest stunt was nothing new. Throughout our childhood, he had endlessly tormented me, trapping me in a suitcase, shaving my Barbies’ heads and torturing my teddy bear, Scruffy. Once, he tied the little bear to a light fixture, the light was turned on and Scruffy’s arm burned off.
As ever, Sam’s laugh rang into the distance. My mum went to flush the spider, and I realised I had a choice: I could throw an almighty tantrum and escalate the situation by demanding Sam be punished, or, as I believe was his intention, I could find it funny. I couldn’t control the blindness, and that was unbearable, but I could control how I reacted to it.
And it was funny, on many levels. If I’d eaten the spider, this story might have had a different ending, but thanks to my mum’s swift intervention, his prank allowed me to feel normal again.
I laughed long and hard in the face of all my misfortune, extinguishing my bitterness and replacing it with hope. In his own way, Sam was showing me how much he cared, doing something he knew would snap me out of my gloom. He didn’t treat me differently because I was blind and it helped me to feel like myself.
It also gave me the relief I needed for what was going to be a very challenging year ahead. The steroids didn’t work and I had to have three surgeries on my eye before my sight was eventually restored. Now, 16 years later, I can still see. I’m not allowed to drive and I do walk into things a lot but I’ve regained my independence. Of course, a fear still lingers at the back of the mind: “Will it happen again?” It might. But it is not a fear I have allowed to dominate my life. For now, I am making the most of having regained my sight, grateful for my brother’s mischievous tendencies – and thankful that I can always check for spiders.