I Woke Up Blind: 5 Dark (And Drunk) Realities After Sight

Somehow Lynsey chose to continue living -- perhaps because she had a young daughter who needed to get to school.

"My thoughts were if I could just hold myself together until she gets to school, THEN I can fall apart," she says. To keep her daughter from panicking about the whole "Mom is blind now" thing, she employed the time-honored parenting trick of turning crises into fun.

"I said to my daughter, 'Let's play a game. Let's see how good you are at making your breakfast!' I carried this on throughout getting the both of us dressed: 'Does mummy look beautiful and dressed, or does she look silly?' We walked at what was probably slower than snail's pace. I was feeling everything on the way with one hand, whilst holding my daughter's hand in the other."

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Luckily, Lynsey lived very close to her daughter's school, and there were no roads to cross on the way, but that's still pretty impressive. We're pretty sure we couldn't have made it to the bathroom without somehow falling off a cliff, Looney Toons-style.

Audrey had the benefit of knowing she was going blind, so she could plan ahead. One step is "blind boot camp," which is apparently a real thing. "First, I took mobility classes to learn how to get around using a white cane," she says, "They also do computer training. Cooking classes, where I'm sad to say not a single fire was started while I was there, though while organizing a spice cabinet during my first week at school -- since I didn't read enough Braille yet to read the labels on the spice bottles -- they suggested I sniff the spices to find out what they are. Naturally, one of the first spices I took a fat whiff of was white pepper ... My sinuses were never clearer than they were on that day."

Hilarious slapstick aside, there were some much more frightening challenges: "Your mobility final is: they leave you somewhere, and it's up to you to find your way back," Audrey says. If that sounds like the premise of a cruel reality show, that's basically how it played out.

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"They left me on Telegraph in Berkeley, and I was supposed to go further into Berkeley, but I got turned around and ended up in Oakland, where some lovely gangsters helped me find the right bus and I got a free burrito from the Bomb burrito shop since it was by now night, and I'd missed dinner."

That still counts as passing your final, though! Really, the only way to fail is to call it off, die, or just hoof it to Mexico and never come back.

"Have you ever thought about how many times you drop something?" Audrey says. "I'm super clumsy and that's not great when you're blind. Every day, I lose something."

Even something as basic as wiping your ass becomes flummoxing.

"I think that if Greenpeace knew the amount of loo roll I used in those first few months, they would string me up," Lynsey says. "It was definitely a case of use as much loo roll as you can until the wiping felt different. If the loo roll started to drag on my skin I knew I was clean."

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It also becomes uniquely clear how many words there are in the world, and not all of them can be printed in Braille, or pleasantly read aloud to you by Stephen Fry. Lynsey's unfortunate mishaps have included buying dog treats instead of cookies, and brushing her teeth with antiseptic cream.

"Filling the bath for myself and my daughter was also scary," she says. "A few times I overflowed the bath, or filled it with scalding/ice-cold water."

But not everything depends on eyesight: Audrey does her own plumbing, and knows other "blind people, who were good at fixing cars when they could see -- and they're still good at it," she says. "My gram's neighbor worked on cars as long as I knew him ... He just spends a lot of time feeling up what's under the hood so he can get to know her (cars are all female), as well as feeling what's under the chassis.

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"Also, when you're driving a car, you can often tell what's wrong with it based on the sound it's making or if something is leaking by how it smells."

Although hopefully someone else drives it away.

Your dreams go bonkers as well: "Holy shitballs, has it affected the way I dream," Audrey says. "I didn't used to dream a lot, but when I did, they generally weren't happy dreams. Now I dream every damn night, and they're crazy vivid and mostly crazy scary."

Science isn't certain what makes blind people have more nightmares, but the theory is that it's because they're under so much stress, being blind and all. To fight the clowns waiting to eat her soul in dreamland, Audrey has to drown them in sedatives, but even so, she still "kind of dread[s] falling asleep."

As Audrey alluded to earlier, blindness can also mess with your ability to sleep. It's called non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder, and it's when the inability to perceive light confuses your body and your circadian rhythm goes all to shit, scientifically speaking.

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"I actually had a very, very regimented sleep pattern -- I went to bed at 9 p.m. every night with very few exceptions -- since I was five years old," Audrey says. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, it was bed at 9 p.m., asleep within 30 minutes, no dreams, and up around 7:30 a.m. Now that I'm blind, my sleep schedule is all over the place ... At least once a week, I can't sleep at all, and every other month or so, I go through a three to five day stretch where I don't sleep. Around day 3 or 4, I start tripping balls and not in a fun way ... It gets really hard to concentrate, I get even more clumsy than I normally am, and I go a bit insane emotionally."

And she can't even watch infomercials all night instead of sleeping. Surely, that must be what hell is like.

"It becomes easy to say 'If I smoke some weed right now, I wouldn't be bored, because I'll be concentrating on being stoned' ... I've observed that an amazing amount of blind people do some sort of drug or drink."

Coincidentally, being blind is also a really great cover for being wasted in public.

"If I have to deal with people, I can totally wear sunglasses and nobody has to see my squinty eyes and know I'm stoned," Audrey says. "Also, if I, say, walk into a wall, I'm not stoned, I'm blind."

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Forget about cleavage -- a white cane is an actual "get out of jail free" card.

"My ex-boyfriend and I were walking around downtown once drinking rum and soda out of Big Gulps, because I'm a classy bitch," Audrey says. "We got stopped by a cop who said 'You, ma'am, are obviously swerving because you're blind, but you, sir, are drunk.' He was gonna throw my ex in the drunk tank, but I said I couldn't get home without him, and may have cried a little to give it that something special, so he let him go."

It's not much of a trade-off for all the crushing boredom, and fucked-up dreams, and missing out on Mad Max: Fury Road, but it's something.

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That scene is patently ridiculous for the sighted, so it was awful nice of them to sacrifice artistic integrity just for their blind viewers.

On the other hand, certain genres are right out.

"Most horror films and shows rely highly on the visual element and the musical element, so when the music picks up, I'll know something scary is supposed to happen, but have no idea what that scary thing is. Action movies are a problem for similar reasons. Imagine watching a movie like The Matrix with your eyes closed the entire time."

Hit play and try it right now.

To be fair, at least where the sequels are concerned, it might be an improvement.

When Lynsey went blind, she thought she'd have to give up dancing. Luckily, she discovered one form where sight wasn't an issue: pole-dancing.

"I thought that would be a way of dancing again, without the worry of bumping into people, or falling off the stage -- because you have a pole to hold on to. I have been attending Pole Classes with my amazing instructor for almost three years, and in September last year, I won the first U.K. Competition with a Disabled Category. This year I successfully defended the title."

She's also, against all logic, taken up racecar driving: "A few years ago, I did a sponsored Blind Drive to raise money for Guide Dogs charity. It involved driving a Nissan Micra around the Nissan test track. I had never driven a car in my life."

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It sounds like the makings of a Darwin award, "but I got the fastest lap of all the participants: 94 mph." Of course, it helped that she was in "a dual-controlled car, accompanied by a driving instructor."

Fittingly, he gave Lynsey some choice words of wisdom that we would all do well to heed: "Just point where you want to go, and don't die."

Lynsey is an accomplished pole dancer. Check out her Facebook page here.

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