 A blurred image of a stack of copies of Wolf Siren on a coffee table with my small fluffy dog Neville sat on the sofa behind them. There I was, delightedly saying that, now, when anyone asks me what I can see I can just point them towards my novel, Wolf Siren, and say, ‘read this and you’ll know’ — and then less than four months after publication day my vision had the audacity to change for the worse and my novel-length explanation was out of date... Typical! In one way, a change in my vision is not a new experience. I was born visually impaired and have a long list of eye conditions that I never remember. But my sight deteriorated further when I was 17 because the pressure in my left eye was too high and this caused more damage to my already damaged optic nerve. I already have a grey swathe across a patch of my vision from this which happened around October last year but over time I just got used to it. This summer, I found out the medication I was on was no longer working to keep this pressure low and I would need surgery in order to preserve the sight I have. I considered writing a blog on this then but I didn’t because I told myself no one needs to know and who would want to — but then I also found myself googling things like ‘people who might be losing their sight and have surgery to save it but then that surgery makes it a bit worse but not as worse as it might get without doing the surgery’ and, shockingly, I didn’t find much. (But now if anyone does google that they’ll find this blog and if that’s you, oh my gosh I was joking but WELCOME!) I wrote Wolf Siren with a visually impaired main character called Red because sight and sight loss is a spectrum that rarely appears in books. But even so I didn’t expect to experience a bit more of that spectrum just four months after the novel’s publication. But this time it wasn’t the pressure that caused the change in my vision (but as you might have guessed from my cryptic googling above) it was the surgery itself.  Me wearing a hospital gown with a giant black arrow drawn on my face over my left eye. I am smiling tiredly (it was very early in the morning!). I had never had any kind of surgery before but I had recently read Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz which unlocked a new fear of medics accidentally doing the wrong surgery on the wrong patient. But luckily that fear was assuaged by a doctor taking a big felt tip pen and drawing an arrow over my left eye. With the right (correct!) left eye labelled, a nurse swung a screen round at the other end of the room and asked if it showed my signature on the consent form. Now I don’t think I’d have been able to see it at the best of times, but that day they’d dilated my pupil for the surgery and everything was a very bright blur, so I answered, ‘I think that is…. Probably… true,’ like I was on Would I Lie to You rather than partaking in a rigorous (if inaccessible) safeguarding procedure. The good news is that it probably was my signature as the correct surgery was performed on the right (left) eye and it went relatively smoothly. I was on a lot of eye drops but as the weeks passed and I waited out the recovery time and disentangled what my vision is against any medicine side effects, it’s safe to say the world is much blurrier than it was before surgery, the distance now looks like a smudged watercolour painting, and I am still finding myself taking the long way round if it means a slightly easier road crossing because I don’t quite trust my judgment on how far or fast cars are going!
One of the most disconcerting things has been the change in how I see (or don’t see!) facial expressions. Even if I’m close to someone, like across a table, I cannot clearly work out what their face is doing. And strangely, I’ve found that because I cannot see this, I feel awkward about looking at them or holding eye contact because I think I might miss some kind of non-verbal expression or gesture and it’ll be very obvious that I’ve missed it. It feels like I might be caught out, even though that is ridiculous because it’s no secret that I can’t see well and ‘caught out’ makes it sound like I’ve done something wrong. Perhaps, it’s not wanting to draw attention, which is something I definitely felt growing up and something Red experiences in Wolf Siren. But I think, too, that it is perhaps also a reminder of the change in my vision that I am still getting used to. When my vision changed at 17, I remember instinctively glancing towards the clock in the kitchen for the time because I used to be able to see it, and each time I did it I’d get annoyed at myself for giving myself that reminder. As I got older, I both got used to my new way of seeing and more confident (though not perfectly so) in doing things my own way. With a change in my vision, which I know I will get used to just like before, I’ve lost the familiar frames of reference I had for the world because everything looks different, and even though my vision is now that bit worse than Red's, I somehow feel like I've related to her all the more the last few months. I might not have a magic woodland to guide me like Red does in Wolf Siren, but I have other workarounds to get the hang of as I relearn and memorise the same old world that feels strange and new. Is it hard? Yes. Is it tiring? Yes. But is it possible? Also yes!
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