A Room with a Darker View by Claire Phillips

Author:Claire Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

January 2002

It was here, at this third hospital, that she repeatedly made her terrifying pronouncement: I am going blind, Claire. Soon I will be blind.

Each time I called the hospital that January, my mother’s distress was that much more acute, her impending blindness of even greater certitude.

These terrifying delusions reminded me of the same paranoiac proclamations made by Nathaniel, the protagonist in E. T. A. Hoffman’s renowned fantastic story of 1816, The Sandman, who by story’s end will throw himself off a bell tower in an uncontrollable fit of outsized fear. My mother’s “blindness” was a delusion much like Nathaniel’s fear of a folkloric Sandman whose job it was to steal misbehaving children’s eyesight in the middle of the night. The event that precipitated my mother’s “blindness” had been an eye infection she contracted during what would be one of her many harrowing relapses. Despite the careful administration of the medicated eye drops by my brother’s wife, the infection returned. One eye would become permanently slatted. Even so, she was in no way going blind. The damage was not to her eye, but to her eyelid. In her paranoid state, however, the injury manifested as a powerful delusion. Just as concerning were the ensuing delusions of a painful broken arm and total paralysis of her spine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.