The hook: a report on BBC news.
This week I learned that when you are running out of oxygen, the first thing that happens is you lose your sense of color vision.
This is a screen grab of the expert telling me that factoid, not an example of you losing your color vision.
So I suppose everything turns black and white. Scary.
6 responses to “TWIL: Color Vision”
It doesn’t click out, though, but instead fades; it’s kind of like how in dim-enough light you don’t have color vision? So except for the “oh, shoot, hypoxia” aspect when you do know that, it’s not startling. (I black out when I stand up for long enough, and color vision goes but isn’t usually noticed and then it’s like a dimmer switch on the lights as well, but by then I’m also really fuddled and groggy (see: brain not getting enough oxygen), so it has taken a lot of training to get myself to “if the world is fading out of your vision, immediately find a wall and slide down it to the floor” when that is happening.)
That said, my standing-to-hypoxia-to-syncope is pretty rapid – within 2-3 minutes of standing up “at ease” – so maybe for slower hypoxia there would be some less-fuddled time wherein one would definitely notice reduced color vision? and reduced color vision is more noticeable in some contexts than others – when you have things that normally look *very* different because of color but are the same shade of grey without color vision. So I don’t know. But I suspect, between the gradual fade and the confusion and apathy that also tend to come with hypoxia, it would not be super-freaky in practice unless you knew it was hypoxia and therefore you were going to die, in that sort of context?
KC – that sounds really dangerous! Do you have a tilt table or someway to stand without fainting?
It’s the being-standing that does it (normal blood vessels constrict when you stand so your blood doesn’t pool in the lower half of your body; mine have mostly forgotten how to do this), so the main thing for me is to keep the muscles in my legs tight via a perpetual slight squat or similar so that the muscles squeeze the blood vessels a bit. But mostly it means “don’t stand for long!” because the brain freaks out about it way before it gets to syncope. If I need to go out, I add layers of compression stockings (which make my feet really unhappy since they become cylinders instead of normal foot shape, but, tradeoffs). and I try to keep blood volume up.
Also it is less dangerous now that I know what’s going on and have trained in the “find a wall to slide down” response pretty aggressively (to the degree that I’ve grabbed a doorframe to slide down when it was just a brief power-dimming, once, although the power turned back up before I slid down it). Some years now I don’t even black out once, because I catch it in plenty of time every single time! But yes. There are worse things in the world than only having enough brain oxygen while lying down, but it does rather interfere with most normal human activities.
KC – nothing could sound braver than your assertion that not having oxygen isn’t so bad.
Hm, I have somehow misrepresented it, then, if it sounds brave. Possibly some of my perspective on it is skewed by the fact that in early diagnosis stages, things like ALS were on the table and it is NOT THAT and that is really really really good?
Yes, my brain can’t do anywhere near what it used to be able to do before I got sick, even when I am lying down, and that sucks and has required a lot of Personal Growth for me to not be as cranky about it, but *mostly* as long as I play by the rules and keep pumping my leg muscles while briefly upright and don’t stay upright for long, I only experience entirely-manageable hypoxia on a day-to-day basis (except when I’m doing more poorly than average; then it gets a bit trickier), I don’t much notice either the mild hypoxia instances or the bizarre strategies anymore. Doing weird dances while rapidly washing hands after using the bathroom? Normal, of course! Staggering like someone who’s just come off the tilt-a-whirl when not able to be wall-walking? Normal. Having the lights go dim artificially? Get thee to a flat surface!… but as long as that happens, it’ll be a queasy-but-fine situation.
I mean, also, I am not perpetually distracted by Macron, nor is my bladder spasming; a friend has easy-break bones and I do not; another friend has a perpetual migraine plus an autoimmune sunlight response; so there is also that: there are so many symptoms out there that are unwieldy and that I do not have! 🙂
KC – I hear you. Also, I’ll be more aware now when I see someone dancing in the bathroom.