Charles Bonnet Syndrome

For many years my mother had hallucinations. Mind you she was more on the ball at eighty-two than I am now.

She suffered from macular degeneration for about ten years before passing away last year. Not a pleasant condition. Your vision slowly disintegrates starting dead center and gradually worsens until all you have left is peripheral vision. Imagine looking at the person across from you and only seeing a gray blur where their face should be. Eventually you must rely on the sound of a voice to recognize a loved one.

Shortly after her macular started to worsen, my mother was spending the weekend with me. She suddenly, frantically called saying there were rats on the walls. Assuring her that there were no rats, I poured her a martini and we started to talk. She told me that she had been seeing strange things for a while. Miles of brick walls along the side of the road, flowers growing on the ceiling..."not good", I thought.

On her next visit to the retina specialist I told him about her "visions". He asked her to describe what she was experiencing and told us that it appeared she had a "rare" condition called Bonnet Syndrome. (There are many websites on Bonnet but this link seems to explain it best and searching images will show that sometimes these visions can be quite frightening). 

I've since learned that it's not as rare as we think.  Unfortunately, many people don't share their experiences for fear others will think they're suffering from dementia. My mother told me that in the beginning, she thought she was losing her mind.  Eventually she developed a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Why couldn't Gregory Peck appear instead of a rock?

When the eyes stop sending messages to the brain, it replaces that loss with images of it's own. In my mother's case it was bricks, buildings, flowers, rocks, people, faces and sometimes, rats. But more often than not, it was rows of Mayan women and children. 

Occasionally when we'd be driving on a highway  I'd notice that she would flinch...the way you do when you think a squirrel is going to dash in front of the car. One day when she flinched, I asked what she saw.  Apparently there were twenty Mayan women walking in front of my car which was traveling at about 60 mph. Mind you, they were walking...yet we never came close to running over them. They just seemed to be heading in the same direction we were. My mother said that more often than not, the images she experienced where of these women.

The small inheritance my mother left me is what has made my dream of owning a home in Merida possible. I think those Mayan women and my mother have led me to a good place. My vision of living in Yucatan was her vision too.