macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis Reset Button – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

Reset Button

My body hit the reset button yesterday. In about 15 minutes I threw up four times. Then I was fine. What was up with that?

Friday night I slept ‘weird’. You know when you are not sure if you are dreaming or awake? One of those nights.

Saturday is my busy exercise day. They scheduled Zumba and yoga back to back. Two of my favorite classes by two of my favorite instructors. Probably overdid something because my upper back was achy later.

Then I had a report to do for work. This was a rush job so I could not use the scoring service. For those of you who do not know, hand scoring a personality test can be long, tedious and confusing when you have good vision. This was a chore.

Then to top it off, Beastie Baby and I got caught in the rain. Should have listened to her. She had been after me to go earlier but I needed to score that cursed test.

Bam. Reset! Thinking about it later I decided it was the couple of hours (or more!) I took to score and write that did it to me.

It was fatiguing and I did feel like I was laboring, but how much energy can just plain, old seeing really use? Actually, a lot!

Did not find much on the energy used by sight but there are suggestions sight is a very energy costly sense. Iflscience.com has an interesting article on blind cave fish and their cousins who live in regular streams. They estimated the fish with vision were using between 5% and 15% of their energy on vision. The variation was due to variations in fish size. Smaller fish, bigger energy consumption. That is because of the brain to body ratio but that is not important to this discussion.

The important point is: vision is an energy hog! The iflscience.com article also noted another way of realizing how energy-expensive sight is is to be aware of how quickly species living in total darkness lose their sight. Vision is just too energy-expensive to a species that has no use for it.

So, OK, maybe I am the only one who finds blind cave fish interesting. How does this relate to us? It means when we are trying to see, we are burning energy. This is a body stressor. Thus my vomiting session yesterday.

That means we need to be aware of just how much effort we are exerting. I probably need to be kinder to my body and more cognizant of my limitations before it goes into reset mode…tough lesson.

I also pulled an article on eye strain off the web. Will read it and get back to you. See if there is anything that can be done about THIS problem.?

Next: Salmagundi

Home