When you have RP, you literally become one of the walking wounded.  Walls, chairs, tables, foot stools, fire hydrants, small children, shopping carts, wet floor signs, shoes, cupboard doors, store mannequins and so much more, jump out at you from seemingly nowhere and the result is often injury.  I am almost always bruised from bumping into things during the day, and often have scrapes as well.  Most recently, I seem to be on a roll of injuring my head and face.

My lower field of vision seems to be where I run into the most trouble. Just to clarify:  If I sit with my hands in my lap and slowly raise them in the air, I don’t see even a glimmer of them until they are level with my bottom lip.  I am told that most people can see their hands in their laps while looking straight ahead.  So, as you can imagine, when the world below is pretty much non-existent and the world above and to the side is just barely there, disaster is imminent.

My two most recent head injuries occurred while attempting to pick up dog toys from the floor.  The first was when the huge black dresser in my bedroom jumped up and smacked me quite hard on the forehead.  The room spun round for a minute and stars danced in front of my eyes and then the pounding began.  Luckily, I was left with only an unsightly bump and a lingering headache.  The crazy thing is that I know the dresser in there, I just have some serious spacial relationship issues and of course that pesky blind thing.

The second collision was with a wrought iron chair in the living room.  I bent down (apparently quite quickly) to retrieve a stuffed dragon from the floor and the next thing I knew, the bridge of my nose had become intimate with the cruel iron of the dining room chair.  It wasn’t the first time this particular chair had jumped rudely into my path, but it is usually my toes and feet that suffer injury from the chair’s legs.  I have been meaning to get rid of that damn chair.

The culprit involved in my face injury was a glass cat food bowl.  I suffer from a touch of OCD and I have to pick up the cat food bowls and put them in the sink as soon as the cats have finished eating, and I sometimes do this with a bit of panic.  On the morning of the collision, my husband was home and wanting to help out; little did I know, he had already gone to pick up the cat’s bowl and because he was bent down I of course didn’t see him.  I was bending down to pick up the bowl and he was standing up with the bowl and the result was a collision between my eye and a glass bowl.  I have to admit, I freaked out a bit about this one.  Because I have such an array of issues with my eyes, any injury, no matter how small, to either of my eyes makes me freak out.  When the edge of the bowl made contact with my eye, I remember feeling a burning pain and pressure and everything went blurry.  I immediately started panicking and crying and my poor husband felt terrible, even though it was so not his fault.  Eventually, I calmed down and my vision cleared and the burning stopped and all I was left with was a cut on my nose and a bruise in the corner just outside my eye.

Sometimes, especially at home, I move through the rooms as if I can see normally; I am going to have to seriously start thinking about moving more slowly through the world.  My face and head will thank me, not to mention my toes, feet, fingers and hands.