Seeing Double –

Long Covid and Ways of Seeing

Georges Braque, Glass on a Table (1909–10)

Hello and welcome to The Art of Convalescence.

A few days ago, at my parents’ house in Northumberland, I had sudden onset diplopia. One minute I was staring vacantly at the chair in my bedroom, the next, there were two chairs, not juxtaposed so much as overlapping at starkly disjointed angles. The same with the pictures on the wall, and the mantelpiece and everything else – all now fractured into a great optical orchestra like a cubist painting by Braque or Picasso. Dizziness and nausea soon followed.

Readers who are familiar with this Substack will know that I am a begrudging teetotaler, which rules out that as a cause. At first I thought: stroke, aneurysm, blindness, why do the gods always pick on me?

I fumbled around for some water (hoping, blindly, that a good gulp could save me from this horror) and struggled to secure the glass to the bedside table. And then I did what all self-respecting men in their mid-thirties would do: I cried for my mother.

Who duly arrived, took a picture of my face, called the local surgery and awaited instructions. But, as the minutes ticked by, and there was no blistering headache, and no blackout, I began to suspect that my eyes were just the latest victim of the myriad body parts and systems already under siege from Long Covid – which always seems to inveigle its way, like a double agent, into important command and control centers. (Diplopia, it turns out, is quite commonly experienced by my fellow Long Covid compatriots, probably the product of a faulty vestibular system.)

If I closed either eye, I could see just fine, but with both eyes open there was two of everything. Initially, I found this reassuring – ‘I might have to wear a patch over one eye for the rest of my life, but at least I can still see the world,’ I thought. But I was soon informed by Google that binocular diplopia (what I had) is more worrying than monocular diplopia (where you can see double even with one eye closed).

By now, we were on the way, my parents and I, to the A&E for eyes at the RVI in Newcastle. My octogenarian father was confined to the backseat, and, struggling to digest his recently eaten lunch, was succumbing to a bout of sudden onset car-sickness induced by my mother heroically hurling the car around the corners of the B6320. Not the post-prandial nap he’d been looking forward to, poor Dad.

If I opened both eyes, I could see two versions of the white lines on the road, and the surrounding countryside looked a bit like this (albeit a little less parched):

Georges Braque, Trees at L'Estaque (1908)

But as we got further towards Newcastle, the lines began to get closer together, so that, by the time we arrived at A&E, the whole thing had gone away. When I was seen by the doctors, they said, ‘It’s always the way: by the time patients get here it’s too late; the problem has gone away. We can’t tell what the problem is unless you’re experiencing diplopia when we examine you.’ ‘No scans, then?’ ‘No.’

Back home, then, a little discombobulated, and totally exhausted.

It did get me thinking, though, this episode, about the metaphorical implications of double vision and Long Covid. Last time, I wrote about how daydreaming provides an escape from the physical body rooted in space and time. It’s striking that daydreaming takes place with both eyes open – with one eye, so to speak, on one’s surroundings – and the other – the mind’s eye – lost in the fantasy of a better future. It is a way of populating an unstoried life with tales of the future.

The post-viral patient, then, lives a diplopic life. I didn’t need fragmented vision to see that.