My little boy flits right by me like a silvery apparition, a ghost. I can hear his sweet husky voice calling out to me, but his face is a ghoulish swirl of beige tones that no longer cohere.

I am lying in bed, my one good left eye covered in gauze. I’ve just had my second trabeculectomy surgery done, two days after the first one on my right eye. All in a bid to keep the glaucoma ravaging my sight at bay.

It’s just past the one-year anniversary of my disease, or what I now call my second child. I discovered it in January 2019, and after a year of fluctuating eye pressures and maxing out all four classes of glaucoma meds, the eye drops ceased to work and surgery was inevitable. While most people space out their trabeculectomies months apart, I decided to do both eyes within days of each other. To get it done and over with.

As a result of my bravado, I am virtually blind after my surgeries. My world is shrouded in mist, a nightmarish impressionist painting where too much light is pouring in and and everything is in soft focus. I try to type a message to my sister to update her on my condition, but I can’t make out the text on the screen, no matter how I enlarge it.

All the emotions I’ve suppressed over the year tear right through the cool, brave front I’ve so carefully cultivated. All my hopeless optimism dissipates with each blink of an eye that no longer focuses. I am at once angry, frustrated, desperate, empty. I feel like a deer trapped in the headlights of a reality it can’t escape.

I am only 30, yet stricken by a disease that plagues those in their 60s; a chronic condition that will haunt me for the rest of my life, no matter where I run.

They say the fog will lift and my vision will clear up as the days go by. I know in my heart that this is true, but right now I can’t see beyond the tears. Right now, at this moment, I’m drowning.