by Gavin Jones

Number 22 – In the Studio

I sat in the corner of the studio and began to draw. I used oil pastels because they would smudge and I could scratch them. The colors could smear into each other. I could attempt to create a facsimile of the world my eye saw. Drawing could become a testament to the form and colors of blindness.

Before the year was out I would be having a transplant which – hopefully – would restore my sight. Drawing this different vision was pretty important to me, although I had long since given up the dream of following a career as a visual artist. This sight was not, in itself a disability. It was an ability unique to me. I had a vision impossible to be shared with others. That is the thing with much that is known as blindness: it is anything…

Image Source: http://www.imoderate.com

A decade or so before my keratoconus showed up, I recall seeing my former internist back home when I became so horrible ill from what I now know was classical Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.  I had lost 30 lbs and was well below 100 due to throwing up from the pain all day and had this gaunt face with dark under eye circles when my doctor walked into the exam room and said to the half-dead person in front of him, “What happened to you?” in a very concerned tone.  My internist was a smart and good doctor, but he was scratching his head like a monkey over what could possibly have made a fit and healthy young woman turn into a zombie seemingly overnight.  In the end, he ordered blood work and sent me a copy with a referral to a rheumatologist.  My doctor hand wrote the following…

I’d like to share a little about my on going constant battle with OCD  (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) & how it has become worse over the years as my eyes have changed.  I think it started around 1994 when I first began to notice my eyes being a little blurry.  Well I say that I noticed it was more like other people constantly telling me I needed glasses and this annoyed me so much I chose to ignore it.  Eventually by 1995 I decided to bite the bullet & go to a high street optician & get glasses for using at work on the computer etc…The glasses never felt right & made me feel very dizzy & did little for my vison so I went back twice but they said they couldn’t be improved so I stopped wearing them which annoyed my parents no end as they had paid for them. 

Its now 1999…

Google never seems to run out of wacky inventions. This time around, the tech giant unveils Smart, contact lens with a glucose-tracking technology that monitors blood sugar through the wearer’s tears. Awesome or awkward? ReadForbes‘ report below.

(Google/AP) Image Source: forbes.com

Google “glucose” right now, and you’ll find a slew of results with Google itself in the header. This is because Google is getting into a new market: Diabetes. The company has just revealed a new method for monitoring glucose, in a classically Google-clever way: Smart contact lenses with tiny glucose-tracking technology will monitor wearers’ glucose levels not by measuring the sugar in their blood, but by tracking it in their tears.

“It doesn’t look like much, but it was a crazy amount of work to get everything so very small,” said Google researcher Brian Otis in a statement. The research, by the company that’s also brought us…