That afternoon, non-candidate boys ‘loused around’ classroom verandahs chatting up girls, posture and eyes aware of the teacher-on-duty out to catch ‘couplers’ while the candidates, showy with textbooks in hand and a swagger in their walk, on the way to the compulsory revision sessions scheduled, passed them. They exchange looks of envy—the candidates’ tinged with regret for all the time wasted and wishing they had the freedom their juniors enjoy (for ‘coupling’, ‘kadanke’, leisure club, ‘lousing around’, etc.), and the non-candidates’ with the anxiety to become candidates, closer to the end of one level and at the beginning of a greater one. To command respect. The school was a series of rectangular box buildings partitioned and assigned tags above doors that announced each section: Lab, Senior Four (S4) East, S4West, Administration, Staff Room, etc.
Those too cowardly to ‘vibe’ girls littered the school gardens just past the school parking lot in tight knots of two or three, splayed on the freshly mowed grass, lazing in the shade of trees swaying in the breeze, undoubtedly talking about their ‘kawu’ and the next Visitation Day or this and that ‘belle’ being ‘hotter’ than the other whom they would talk to if only they were ‘interested’. I had never been any of those boys—I was on my way to becoming a ‘sciencer’.
I could see the other girls in their cliques, talking animatedly and laughing for everyone to hear. They never seemed to settle in any one place. They walked all over the school in tight black skirts (tight to the degree a catholic school could allow, which was tight enough to serve ‘optical nutrition’), with colourfully socked and sandaled feet, brandishing subtly made-up faces only the keen-eyed would notice. Boys, we always noticed. Belles always looked hotter on weekends.
To get to my classroom, S4East, from the boys’ wing—a two-storied box-shape building overlooking two squat ones around a quadrangle—one had to go past the assembly ground/football pitch, then through the school parking lot. The sluggishness of my fellow candidates made it seem like I was running to class. I walk fast; I’ve always been a fast walker. I learned it from my father. When I was 10 or 11 years old, he would walk me to school a lot. I enjoyed these walks with him. He walked with such abandon, throwing his legs forward, uncaring of where his feet landed, and I watched from behind, trying to mimic him. But my legs were short, and he would have to stop for me to catch up. He taught me a trick he learned in police training whenever the order was given for a synchronized march: “Follow my feet. When I step right, step right. When I step left, step left and stop when I stop.” I did as he bid and soon found myself scuttling into potholes and one time, a ditch. “You have to look where you’re going at the same time.” I like to remember that there was laughter in his voice on those mornings when we walked together, and he pulled me out of collision courses with ditches and puddles of muddy water. I like to remember that he was never in a rush, that it was how he always walked, and that he savoured walking me to school. Soon I learned to read the rhythm of his movement, and in time, we walked in sync. I would be winded and sweaty when we got to the school gate, and he would pad me with his handkerchief, businesslike, drying my sweaty face, telling me to do as I had done the week before when we had to see Teacher Rose, the headmistress, again. My father’s rhythm and pace stuck with me as I got older.
In the parking lot, I passed my classmates in their ash-grey t-shirts and black trousers—many had had them slimed according to the ‘fitting’ trend at the time, and you could see the clumsy needlework Katamba had charged them ‘2 bob’ for. A’ level students wore red t-shirts, and their girls had the extra privilege of keeping their hair long as long as it wasn’t plaited. Their t-shirts were always ‘fitting’ around the chest (the needlework invisible) as were the black skirts, rebellious, around the hips and ‘nyash’. A’ level belles were the hottest. They had the sleekest natural hair held in a bun and wore the rarest and most complicated perfumes—an attempted alloying of fragrances to create a novel smell. The smells, in their overpowering sweetness, confused my nose sometimes, cloyingly, to the level that I tasted them at the back of my throat and felt them hammer my temples in volleys. Then, days or even weeks later, in the absence of any belle, at any one moment, I would be assaulted by the dizzying fragrance and its accompanying headache.
That afternoon, seeing all this, no A’ level girl in sight, I hit a wall of that smell. A few steps later, having walked into a world of dizzying head-pounding-fragrance and nausea, I stopped short, everything I saw, like at the end of a movie, cut to black, as though the light of the world had been switched off. Since morning, I had had the vague sense of impending doom, like a premonition, and ignored it. The doom had arrived.
I lost sight in the school parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, about a week before the national exams.
A few years earlier, during the third-term holiday of my S1, my father was so proud of me that he finally took me to see a doctor. It was also the first time I walked with him in a long time. He’d taken me around Kampala at the beginning of that year before starting Senior One (to his workplace, to his boss, to his boss’s boss and then to yet another boss, each office grander than the last), and we’d walked in such synchronicity that I felt so proud of myself. I stood behind my father in all those grand offices of big-bellied men the same way I had in Teacher Rose’s office years ago in primary school and let my mind wander as my father spoke.
With a spring in my step, echoing the jolly nature of my father’s walk following the news of my third-term performance, I named places and buildings on our way to the doctor: Nandos, Uganda House, Cham Towers, Post Office, City Square, and pointed, CPS, as we turned into Pioneer Mall. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” my father said to all the places named. He was happy about the full fees bursary I had won.
The doctor’s office was in a place in the city I didn’t know. The walls were plastered with charts of beautiful eyes behind expensive-looking spectacles. Spectacles that seemed to promise a beautiful smile more than clear vision. We didn’t wait long before we were ushered past the receptionist (herself spectacled but unsmiling) into the examination room by a spectacled nurse, also unsmiling. I sat before a smiling spectacled doctor while my father stood behind me.
Did my eyes mist over? The doctor asked, did I feel any pain or itching? Did I put something in them or had an insect or ‘foreign body’ landed there? None of those things, I said, although I always felt headaches of varying intensity. But I’ve always had those headaches, I added. The doctor hm’d and nodded to my answers as he jotted down things. Afterwards, he shined a light into my eyes, observed them both, then the other while flashing his thin torchlight in the opposite eye. I followed the light easily when he asked me to and read all the letters of varying sizes from the distance he told me to stand. I sat in a chair opposite him with a contraption between us, rested my chin where the nurse led it and fixed my head where she ushered it. I looked into the thingamajig’s many lenses as the doctor hm’d some more.
There was nothing wrong with my eyes; he told my father, as far as the tests went, except that it was paramount I get spectacles. “How about the scratching?” my father asked. “Why do they get red sometimes?” I had found that rubbing my eyes made things appear clear whenever my vision blurred, preceding and amid the headaches. I told neither my father nor the doctor, who were eager to pay for a solution and the latter to earn from providing one. In the end, I was prescribed spectacles that did nothing but veil my vision in a slight darkness, weigh heavy on my nose bridge, ache my ears and turn me into an unsmiling old person.
I lost the glasses in S2 and my father blamed my continued suffering on my wasteful carelessness. For the duration that I had them, my father shut his ears from any complaint I made about their uselessness. I read clearly, he would say, watched quite a lot of T.V., did exceedingly well at school and occasionally saw things clearer than my parents. To him, it was as though speaking of my eye problems was intentional to contrast how actually good and unaffected my vision was, even as red as they could get. For attention. The spectacles were the solution he could provide and he had done so. My problem wasn’t physical, however, and no physical solution could help.
Maybe my occasional complaining could explain his anger at me when he was told his son had gone blind.
What I can say about sudden blindness is how immediately the world withdrew from me, and as fast, the fright to get it back with the other senses. I could almost feel it, just beyond the eternal dark: my spatial relation to everything else around, as I tried, first, to define my surroundings—the feel of a space not just with my hands reaching out and grabbing empty darkness, but with my entire body, and then compensate for the sudden alienation. The compass points were reduced to left, right, forward or back relationship with sound, smell and feel. The world was so close and yet so far away. I stood in the dark. In that instant, I was aware of the power of vision over all the other senses—the power of recognition, and identification. I was aware of the aloneness.
There I was, in the school parking lot, sure of only the small portion of the earth my feet touched surrounded on all sides by an abyss of uncertainty. The cloying smell was fading as the headache increased. It felt as though larva had been poured into my forehead and temples and hammered incessantly where it settled. I could feel the bang-bang-bang echoing in the rest of my head. The pain filled the back of my eyes and held my inner ears in tight fists squeezing tighter with each bang. I couldn’t really hear much and yet any sound made the pain worse. Waves of nausea seemed to flow and ebb with the pounding. I felt hot all over though my body trembled. I opened my eyes wide, despite the pain getting even worse, and pulled my lower eyelids down just to be sure. Nothing.
During all this, the reactions you would expect in such instances happened—the panic, the racing heart, the hyperventilation, the tears, sweating, the shaking, the fear, the shouting “I can’t see! I can’t see!” the reaching out and stumbling to the ground that only became solid when touching it, and the screaming, the screaming. The screaming for help.
My father came to get me—I don’t remember how fast. Time slows when in pain. I was outside the administration block seated on a bench, now sobbing, voices and smells coming at me insubstantial like spectres. I was allowed one classmate to wait with me while the rest remained in class. There was a teacher there too but I didn’t hear anything they said. My life was over, I kept thinking. My father would take me home and that would be all. Just one more burden.
He smelled of sweat and stuffy clothes, his voice shaky and sentences short. Until he spoke, I didn’t recognize my father. Painful sound is all I had to go by now. I reached out and touched nothing. He caught my hand as it swung about to reach where I thought the voice was. He held me and for the short duration that he did, he was the world solidified. He beckoned me not to cry, shushing me like a baby, and asked what had happened. I told him. Slowly, he sublimated, becoming a voice speaking to a teacher. Then he solidified next to me again: “Tell me the truth. What happened? Or you just want me to take you home.” There was anger and accusation in his voice. But also, a plea, and the hope that this wasn’t really happening. I said nothing. I felt waves of air blow across my face in directions I couldn’t make out—I would find out later that my father tested my vision by gauging any reaction to his handwaving inches from my eyes.
My father took me home, leading me by hand onto the boda-boda, then into a taxi, shushing me all the while, and when the conductor, in his busyness, had forgotten my condition and rushed me out of the vehicle, my father exploded and unleashed his anger upon him: What sort of person was he?—couldn’t he see his boy was sick? I wondered if I’d heard tears in his voice.
During the journey from school to home, passengers had shared anecdotes of similar phenomena—students who went blind days before exams, or even insane, others who got possessed and even others who fainted in exam rooms. Witchcraft, two or three commented, from jealous family members or classmates’ parents. It was usually the bright students who suffered such fates. I only caught snatches of talk, trying as much as I could to shut my ears from a million other sounds. My father’s silence on the matter only encouraged them. So, when he almost beat up the conductor, the passengers sympathized with my father and admonished the apologetic man even more.
I suffered an intense episode of migraine with aura of which blindness can be a symptom. A migraine is a type of headache, usually recurrent and of throbbing nature, that affects one or two sides of the head with accompanying symptoms such as nausea, visual disturbances and others (which may precede or occur during the headache). Mine had been mild to moderate until that Saturday afternoon.
The cause of migraines is unknown but there are multiple theories that attempt to explain it, the most acceptable being that migraineurs (those who suffer migraines) have a hyperexcitable cerebral cortex whereby disturbance in the neurons in the brain (especially due to genetic factors) allows for certain internal/external factors to trigger migraine. This is by ultimately causing depression of the cortex. Think of depression as reduced functionality. This depression spreads in the brain to meningeal trigeminal nerve fibres causing headaches. Furthermore, there’s decreased blood flow to the occipital part of the brain (responsible for sight/vision). I wondered if this starvation of my brain’s visual centres could’ve caused the blindness but there isn’t an exact answer. If all that isn’t confusing enough, there happens to be the involvement of a certain brain chemical, serotonin, released by particular neurons which ultimately causes neuronal depression thereby compounding the condition. That’s why certain drugs that manipulate the release, uptake or function of this chemical have been used in the treatment of migraines.
I took the usual Panadol and the ‘painkillers’ drug shops gave me for my money which seemed to help a bit. Before that afternoon, the symptoms were tolerable.
There are many types of migraines of which the migraine with aura is most evident here. The experience of my type occurs in four stages: prodrome, aura, headache and postdrome. That vague sense of impending doom I had had that day, I learned, was the prodrome stage which is also called the premonitory stage. This stage can last a whole day. During aura which immediately precedes headache or coincides with it, one experiences symptoms that may be visual, nonvisual or both. One could witness patterns of colour, black dots, and blurred vision or suffer nausea, dizziness, vertigo, and hallucinations of smell such as mine, among others. Headache, the third stage, could last up to 3 days.
When we finally got home, my father and I, we found my mother in a panic. I couldn’t tell from her voice but I felt it in the rigidity of her body. She continued where my father had given up shushing me and led me into the house. In the way of mothers, while my father wondered aloud where he’d get money for the hospital, she asked if I’d eaten and didn’t wait for an answer before she brought food. While my father paced about, she fed me, held a damp cloth to my head, and made jokes: “I have a cross-eyed wife. We’re always fighting. We never see eye to eye.” I’d told her that joke after getting it from T.V., but her laughter now came out short and forced. It was calming, being with her, while my father wondered aloud what would happen with my schooling.
About 2 hours and many stale jokes later, when the headache started receding, and my vision started returning—a slow fade into sight, the right eye faster than the left—I entered the postdrome stage. The stage of alleviation of symptoms. This came with immense relief and elation. The world was returning to me with a vividness that has since returned to bland normality. The euphoria of sight felt like a miracle, and to my mother, it was indeed a miracle, one that didn’t surprise her. Her mother and grandmother had suffered somewhat similar symptoms, and time and calmness seemed to be the solutions that worked for them.
But what are those internal/external factors that trigger migraine? Migraineurs, according to Harold G. Wolff, the prominent headache researcher, usually exhibit a ‘migraine personality’ which, he believed begins in childhood. According to his research:
“The individual with Migraine aims to gain approval by doing more than and better than his fellows through ‘application’ and ‘hard work’ and to gain security by holding to a stable environment and a given system of excellent performance, even at high cost of energy.”
All the times I stood behind my father as he spoke to the headmistress, I distracted myself from the fact that he was asking for more time to come up with the balance of my fees, appealing to her Christian nature that she may allow me back in class as he looked for money. All the times we walked from office to office, boss to boss, I distracted myself from the fact that he was asking for help to afford secondary school. For one term, at least, he would say. I distracted myself from my father’s helplessness and put myself at arm’s length away from the shame of it. This same helplessness I felt from him pacing up and down, wondering aloud about hospital bills, my future—and the shame that there was little he could do to help his boy. A shame which manifested as anger that I knew and felt deeply bore its roots in love.
Like any child, I hated it when my father was angry, and I knew where it came from. I sought to be successful at school, and this ambition required that I attain perfect scores. In my secondary school, the best student was rewarded with a full bursary for the next term. With such an incentive, I resolved that my father would never have to even think about my school fees—and I would be spared the shame of standing behind him in the future. I did all it took.
I got back to school after a few days my mother insisted I spend at home. I sat the national exams. For the whole of my secondary school and university, my father didn’t pay any fees.
In the midst of my academic pursuits, I developed a ‘migraine personality’—ambitious, successful, perfectionist, efficient, etc., and compounding a genetic predisposition, suffered a consequence. Right up to the moment I lost my sight, I had been suffering headaches of varying intensity, but the psychological stress that underlines such a personality had worsened when I became a candidate and the national exams drew near. I put myself under immense pressure not to fail. I didn’t fail, but for one day I will never forget, I bore the cost in full.
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