A Bad Eye

The superpower of looking different and seeing different

My eye: I forget about it, but I am, well, cross-eyed and people notice it right away. People who are around me forget about it with time, but first impressions - I look like an idiot because that is the stereotype.

It’s not just first impressions, I suppose. An old friend of mine once went on an internet date and was so repulsed by seeing someone with a “lazy eye” that she escaped out the back door. She was telling me this story and only realized who she was telling it to a few seconds afterwards.

It was a crazy low probability event that caused my eye problem. It's called toxocariasis of the eye, which means that a parasite from a dog got into my left eye, ate the center of my retina and part of the muscle, robbing me not only of normal-looking eyes but also of most of my sight in that eye. If you have ever been around dogs, you probably have the parasite, but it went to a place like the heart or liver where it had a little lunch then died and no one knew the difference. But I was the unlucky one, the one who won the lottery, a lottery as rare as winning $100M in Powerball, but without the money¹. Don't worry, if you have a dog, you're still extremely unlikely to get what I got.

(Love your dogs. I love dogs to this day. I just am a little more careful washing my hands after I pet them because I can't afford to lose another eye. But dogs are great. Your kids will gain more benefit from dogs than they are likely to ever lose.)

This happened to me when I was ten years old, so I lived through all the kids openly joking about it and all the adults privately joking about it. I was surprised that some amazing women were still actually interested in me, but there really are a lot of good people out there who aren't all about first impressions. (If you look at my profile picture on various social media spots, the Denver Post photographer who took it did a tremendous job hiding my left eye. He was incredibly patient, resisting the calls to use Photoshop.)

In a way, my getting this condition was lucky. What I can see with my bad eye is different than what I see with my good eye. I can't see what I want to see with my left eye - I can't see the center, the thing I want to see. I can only see the periphery, the context, the things that affect what I want to see. When I need a reminder of perspective, I turn my left eye back on (yes, I can do that) and I see the world differently. When I wrote my books, I would turn it on to be creative. When I see someone with a physical ailment, my left eye reminds me how random such things are. When I am having a rough day, turning on my left eye reminds me of the better parts of the world. When I am biking — I don't turn it on much because it can be dangerous, but sometimes that kick of adrenaline is just what I need to get up a hill or chase down a rider ahead of me.

I did look into "fixing" my left eye. There is a surgery to straighten the eye. I can look normal again, but I cannot see normal again. And, importantly, straightening the eye would come at a cost. I have lived with this so long and the alignment of the eyes is so far off that I can turn the left eye off and on, but if I straighten it, that would make it hard to turn off and on. Making it straight would likely cause headaches and vision problems because my brain would have a harder time distinguishing the two images. My superpower came with its own kryptonite. Would you intentionally give yourself pain and vision problems just to look better? I clearly would not.

I do wonder what it would be like to have real depth perception again - to be able to make a jump shot more consistently or hit a changeup. I still love sports - it's what I do for a living. But I've faked being an athlete for 40+ years now and it's gotten me somewhere.

And I wonder how my life would have gone if I had looked normal. Would I have been the golden boy? Probably not. Would I have been the superstar athlete? Probably not. Would I have cared a lot more about superficial stuff?

I look strange. I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable. You'll forget about it soon enough. But now you have the answer for what you never wanted to ask about.

1. Every time there is a big lottery, as there is on this 5th day of September, I think of these odds.