After a long day at work last week, I picked up my purse, shut down my computer, and turned the lights out in my office. When I say it had been a long day, I mean it had been one tiny fragment of a streak of long days in bunch of long weeks that have made up the many long months of one long year.

I patted my pockets down in the hallway and realized I’d left my phone on my desk. So I turned back to the office and immediately panicked. I could not see anything. I had gone completely blind.

As soon as it happened, I knew there was no coming back from this. I was instantly, permanently without sight and I knew exactly why. I once read that while Terry Gilliam was directing Brazil, he got so stressed out that one morning he just couldn’t move from his bed, and that must have been what happened to me, too. Stress had taken my vision. I tried not to scream while I flailed around. No need to increase anyone else’s stress by causing a scene over my sudden and irrevocable blindness, I thought.

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