The Blind Vampire Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

to worry
about possibly going to fight a war where you could get hurt, or
worse. So why are you looking so down?”
    “All my life my peers have been telling me
what a retarded freak I am. Now I have an official card from the
government, making it official. I AM A FREAK.” For my mother’s sake
I left out the word ‘fucking’ that my peers usually had preceding
“freak.” Being a card carrying four-eyed freak was not sitting well
with me.
    Two years after I graduated from high school,
the low vision specialist discovered his error in calling my eye
problem “oversized blind spots” and sent me to Johns Hopkins for
verification. There I spent a long day of eye tests. Some were so
painful that (some years later) when they tested my family, my
father was amazed that I kept coming back, and my sister passed out
during her testing.
    At the end of my first day of hard testing,
my mother and I ended the day in the head researcher’s office,
where the eye specialist looked me over and turned to my mother and
announced, “Your son has RP. He is going blind, and it’s all your fault .”
     

 
    Chapter
Two
    Going Blind
     
    After a dramatic pause, he continued, “Your
son is going blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa or RP. He has black
spots or pigmentation forming in the back of his eyes. Eventually
the pigmentation will cause all the rods and cones to die, and at
that point your son will be totally blind. At this point we don’t
know much about RP, except that it is highly hereditary only
through the woman’s side, so he must have gotten his RP from
you.”
    My mother was no fool and she kept her cool,
until we got out into the parking lot. Once we were in the car, she
put the key into the ignition and sat back. For the first and only
time in my life, I witnessed my mother cry. She had just been told
her son is going blind and it was all her fault. Can you blame
her?
    Retinitis Pigmentosa
    In the 70’s when I was first diagnosed with
RP only two basic facts were known. The first fact was that RP
formed dark spots or pigments in the back tissue of the eye (the
retinas). Hence the name Retinitis Pigmentosa (Latin for
pigmentation of the retinas). How clever. The second fact was that
RP ran rampant through the family and was carried only by the
females of the family.
    Those basic facts were only half-right.
    Years later, after many scientific studies
and the various RP studies using computers to correlate the data,
it was discovered that while many victims of RP had it running
strongly through the family, there were many (like me) with no one
else losing their sight to RP. Possibly a nonhereditary strain?
This brought about theories and conjectures that there are possibly
two or more types of RP.
    Symptoms.
    Night blindness . The
inability to see in dim light situations. Night blindness is the
earliest sign of RP. [Being night blind does not necessarily mean
you have RP. You can be night blind and not have RP.] In my case I
was always night blind.
    Loss of peripheral
vision : Your peripheral vision is your side vision, that
vision not in the direct line of sight. In my case, I started
noticing a real problem in junior high and high school sports.
Large objects like volleyballs and basketballs would disappear from
sight before getting to me. At the time, my low vision doctor
assumed that it was oversized blind spots, since little was known
about RP. Blind spots are areas of the peripheral vision where we
don’t have vision. Everyone has a small blind spot in each eye
where the nerves go out to the brain. Eventually my low vision
specialist could see the pigmentations causing these “oversized
blind spots” as he had been calling them for years.
    Tunnel vision : Loss
of the peripheral vision causes a tunnel vision effect with the
remaining sighted area getting smaller and smaller.
    True tunnel vision :
With only the use of the central vision and no peripheral vision,
someone with RP as if they were looking through a paper