Meet our #Warrioroftheweek of the week, Brynne
Spotlight on: Brynne
Greetings!
I recently read about Visual Snow (VS/ VSS) and immediately identified with many of the symptoms that I have recognized since I was a kid. Yet, I have never met anyone personally who understands exactly how I see.
The symptoms, for me, consist of the persistent flashing of a static-like screen of circular, light reddish, or sometimes clear rings with a black dot in the center. Yet, I can see shapes and colors of objects seemingly clearly. When I close my eyes, the rings are bright red, with black center dots flashing. There is also sometimes a pattern of a tone-on-tone shadowy, cloud-like movement.
For example, it almost looks like air passing from the left and from the right that bypasses one another. Yet the direction of the movement is not limited to left and right. It’s like witnessing clouds or smoke moving from various opposing directions, but it’s very subtle. There is always that separate cloud-like movement screen that is layered behind the flashing rings. There are some more visual descriptions, but I am attempting to keep this as short as possible.
The symptoms mostly don’t bother me, but I am sometimes bothered by my eyes themselves. In the past, I worked in the photo industry, and the strobe lights always bothered me. I have a very quick reflex to flash photography, and it’s hard to capture me with my eyes open with a flash. It is very hard for me to find the right prescription for my eyeglasses, and I am often unsatisfied.
When I was very young, I would ask my mom about them, and she would just say that maybe other people don’t see them because they’re not looking closely enough. I’ve discussed this a number of times over the years with various people at parties, with friends and family, and it would just be something they would laugh with me about. I just chalked it up to being convinced that we all just see and sense things a little bit differently. Twenty years ago, I tried looking it up online and found a little chat group on red dot syndrome, which was a chat group of theories about people talking about it. So I knew only then that there are other people out there, but I didn’t know until today that it was a recognized neurological syndrome that’s being studied.
I’m happy to contribute to any future studies because I am certainly curious about how people see uniquely on a spectrum. A genetic test alerted me a while back that I have precursors for Macular Degeneration, and my grandmother had it in her later years. Thank you.
Warm Regards,
Brynne Rinderknecht
