Coming out of my 2-day bout of blindness
Page down to something animal or garden-related, if you aren’t interested in this long-winded personal post.
Tonight (around 7 p.m.) is the first time I felt I could see well enough to read my monitor screen without using a magnifying glass. That made it really difficult to email, too, since I couldn’t see what I was typing, or had to type with one hand, and hold the magnifying glass with the other. (I still have the screen set to show larger text. But at least I can read the small text now.)
This is diet-related. I will NOT say that this is related to being a vegan(*). But I will say it generally has to do with either eating garbage for a couple days in a row, or not eating enough. I don’t believe it’s caused by eye-strain or lack of sleep.
This isn’t the first time things had gone foggy on me. Generally when it happens, it lasts just a couple of hours or maybe 4 at the most. It generally follows days where I’ve been too lazy to fix a normal dinner, and end up having a couple of bowls of Cheerios instead. So I thought maybe it had something to do with my blood sugar. And I still suspect it might. A couple of times ago, I went to a doctor who sent me to an ophthalmologist and to a lab for a blood test. My blood level was “fine” — 84, which I would consider on the low side. But that was at least a day after the event. So who knows what it was at the time. Anyway, I ruled out the possibility of being diabetic, but not necessarily ruled out being hypoglycemic. But I still think it’s nutrition-related.
This last event followed days were I didn’t eat much at all. I weighed myself on Monday, and noticed (on my scale, which I didn’t trust to be accurate) that I weighed at least 10 pounds less than I did when I retired. I trusted the scale at work, but don’t have access to it anymore. So the next best thing was to use the one in the hallway at the nursing home, which weighed me only three pounds heavier than my home scale. So I decided that I really have lost weight.
And with General Convention coming up next week, I was motivated to get down at least into the next 10. Wouldn’t you know? The day I broke the barrier was the day I couldn’t see the needle on the scale?!
* So my point is, that even though I attribute the event(s) to poor diet, and not because I’m a vegan, I do want to say that before I was a vegan I could afford to eat poorly, and not have it affect my sight.
This dovetails with comments toward the end of this post from change.org, where someone said they would get dizzy when they tried to go vegan. Others commented on basic nutrition information that the person might not have known. And I can agree with that. But even knowing basic vegan nutrition, doesn’t mean we all actually follow it.
I’ll weigh in on the dizzy argument. The first time I seriously tried to go vegetarian in the late ’70’s, I wouldn’t say that I got dizzy. But I did get light-headed, and always made sure I had my hand on a railing when going up and down stairs.
I was lacto-ovo at the time. So I was getting plenty of protein. But I didn’t know anything about nutrition. And something was definitely missing. That was decades before the Internet, and may have even preceded the birth of PETA. So my idea of going veg was to remove meat from my diet, and not replace it with some other protein source(**). I didn’t know about beans. Maybe I knew they existed, but didn’t know their benefits or how to cook cook them.
When I decided I seriously wanted to go veg in 2000 for good, I specifically asked the only vegetarian I knew (from church, for the sake of the anti-religion AR’s) what I should eat, and which stores I should go to to find it, because I remembered my failed attempt in the late ’70’s.
She had good advice, and I found all that I needed that same day. I have never been dizzy. And I have never been light-headed.
But maybe about 10 times since August, 2003, I have had minor bouts of what I would consider being legally-blind — like being in a really heavy fog or if it was bright, like a lot of whiteness blocking things out. Yesterday, when I was outside, I could see well enough to see the garden and the pets when my friend stopped by. But I couldn’t see the driveway well enough to know if I had to step around any ants.
And the only reasons I never panicked over it were that, it is still a novelty, and either it is temporary, and clears up a couple of hours after I had something like orange juice, or my doctor and people he sent me to confirmed that it wasn’t a diagnosable condition. Since I know it’s due to poor eating habits, it’s something I can control. But this time, it lasted for the better part of two days. I was out driving, and it was fine. But I still couldn’t read fine print.
That is all very intermittent.
But in general, I went for the longest time with “lower GI issues”, too. It depended on what I ate, and how much of it I ate. It seems like I haven’t had problems lately. So I guess I’m eating things that agree with me better — or not eating too much of the offending foods like I did in the past — like a pot of chili or a can of nuts, or a whole onion in whatever in a large helping of, say, spaghetti.
Just a warning. Vegan diets should make a person real regular, which is a good thing. I’m assuming it’s because dairy has the opposite effect.
So the point of this is:
- If you’re planning to go vegan, study up on vegan nutrition and take a look at the vegan food pyramid, and eat a balanced diet, including Vitamin B-12.
- If you’ve been a successful vegan for years or decades, don’t automatically assume that people who tried it are lying or making excuses, when they say they had problems when they tried.
- The other point is that people who want to be vegan because they don’t want to support animal cruelty is that the motivation has to be a commitment to find a way to make it work without having adverse effects.
Google for tri-athletes and firefighters who are examples of extremely physically active people who have found ways to be successful vegans. So it’s a matter of adjusting, and developing healthy eating habits if something isn’t working out.
** A note to churches and others who try to accommodate vegans in their midst: We can’t live on “lettuce and black coffee” alone. It is especially important for longer-term events like retreats and conventions, to be sure that vegan options are balanced and filling. If in doubt, at least offer peanut butter to go with the bread, or some vegetarian baked beans. (When my sister asks if I’d like to go out with them to eat, I say “what could I have?”, and she’d say “a salad”. That isn’t a meal. Sorry. And it isn’t filling. And I’m not going to pay big bucks for something I could eat at home for free.)
P.S. So, going back a couple of days ago, what did I eat?
I can’t remember. But recently I’ve been having berries for breakfast, and a salad for lunch, and a normal vegan dinner. I think when I started to notice that my weight was going down, I ate less because I was on a roll. Maybe I had a couple of pieces of (whole grain) toast with (good quality) peanut butter & (organic) jam that isn’t sweetened with sugar, and spaghetti (as in pasta with sauce, but nothing else). I think that was it. That really isn’t many calories. I think it might have been about 800. That, on top of the previous days probably made me deficient in something. I still think I’m hypoglycemic. (But the only time medical practitioners seem concerned if someone’s blood sugar is too low is if a diabetic has taken too much insulin. If a person isn’t diabetic, they seem to think a low reading is “fine”. 84 was “fine” after a 12 hour fast. But they didn’t check the actual day that I called to make an appointment. It could have been much lower that day.)
I just Googled for “cloudy vision”, and found this on a diabetic message board. (Cloudy is the key symptom, not blurry. But this person’s situation sounds like mine, where it’s rare, and lasts just a short time.) I’ll do whatever I have to do to not become diabetic, and not to end up becoming insulin-dependent — even if it means taking up running, like the “Running for their lives” story I saw on a news show years ago about a Native American tribe in the SW with a higher than average statistic for diabetes since the “convenience age” of the 20th Century, and who beat the odds by taking up running again as their ancestors did.