At my birth, I received a gift from the devil. Since I didn’t give a damn about anything other than my pacifier, I had no idea about my hair color, my jaundiced skin, or the UV light over me to try to get rid of the extra bilirubin in my blood. How would I know that my mom would have met someone with the rarest blood type in the world, one that would cause me to destroy my own blood cells and release their contents into my veins? The yellow color would soon go away forever, only memorialized by all the photographs taken by my proud parents.
“Why do you look so yellow?” said my best friend Garret when I showed him my baby shots. “Incompatibility of blood types and release of indirect bilirubin,” my physician father fed me the explanation. I …show more content…
I came home, crying, telling my mom that she never taught me what green paint looked like. She pulled out some green yarn. “What color is this?” she asked. “That’s yellow”, and the next day I went to my doctor. “Mr. MD.” My mom asked, “What is ailing my son?”
“Danielle”, he said. “Your son is colorblind. Don’t worry, Sam, you are not totally screwed, but we do need to have you get an eye test to see what you won’t be able to do your whole life. And by the way, you were born with this, and it is your grandfather’s fault, and your fault as well.”
“How is it my fault?” thinking that it had to do with the blueberries that were always sprayed with weed killer, and which tasted so good.
“You are male, Sam. A guy. Females are rarely colorblind; you just got unlucky.” And as the diagnosis confirmed, I had to learn about the condition, about Ernie, and finally about …show more content…
However, I am going to do a Trumpian exercise. A little lie. Colorblindness very simply is my ability to see color differently than all of you. In other words, I have no disease; I just have a different perception. The retina is composed of rods and cones. One of the photopigments in my cones is abnormal and thus I have red-green colorblindness. If you want to go even further into it, my type is called Protanopia, which is that I have no working red pigment cones. When I see your red, it looks black to me. Your red blood looks like oil flowing through your veins. Shades of orange yellow and green all appear to be yellow. Now, most of you have taken some level of genetics and know that certain conditions occur on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes. Males, unfortunately, are blessed with only one. That means if your maternal grandfather has colorblindness then your mother will be a carrier, having one normal X-chromosome and one abnormal X-chromosome. Each male will have a fifty-fifty chance of being colorblind. I am colorblind; my brother Noah is, for lack of a better word, normal. My mother’s father, Ernie, had the same type of colorblindness that I do. In all honesty, I am sick and tired of hearing the word blindness. In reality, I only see things differently. It is just that all of you who are not color affected are in the majority and I
“Why do you look so yellow?” said my best friend Garret when I showed him my baby shots. “Incompatibility of blood types and release of indirect bilirubin,” my physician father fed me the explanation. I …show more content…
I came home, crying, telling my mom that she never taught me what green paint looked like. She pulled out some green yarn. “What color is this?” she asked. “That’s yellow”, and the next day I went to my doctor. “Mr. MD.” My mom asked, “What is ailing my son?”
“Danielle”, he said. “Your son is colorblind. Don’t worry, Sam, you are not totally screwed, but we do need to have you get an eye test to see what you won’t be able to do your whole life. And by the way, you were born with this, and it is your grandfather’s fault, and your fault as well.”
“How is it my fault?” thinking that it had to do with the blueberries that were always sprayed with weed killer, and which tasted so good.
“You are male, Sam. A guy. Females are rarely colorblind; you just got unlucky.” And as the diagnosis confirmed, I had to learn about the condition, about Ernie, and finally about …show more content…
However, I am going to do a Trumpian exercise. A little lie. Colorblindness very simply is my ability to see color differently than all of you. In other words, I have no disease; I just have a different perception. The retina is composed of rods and cones. One of the photopigments in my cones is abnormal and thus I have red-green colorblindness. If you want to go even further into it, my type is called Protanopia, which is that I have no working red pigment cones. When I see your red, it looks black to me. Your red blood looks like oil flowing through your veins. Shades of orange yellow and green all appear to be yellow. Now, most of you have taken some level of genetics and know that certain conditions occur on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes. Males, unfortunately, are blessed with only one. That means if your maternal grandfather has colorblindness then your mother will be a carrier, having one normal X-chromosome and one abnormal X-chromosome. Each male will have a fifty-fifty chance of being colorblind. I am colorblind; my brother Noah is, for lack of a better word, normal. My mother’s father, Ernie, had the same type of colorblindness that I do. In all honesty, I am sick and tired of hearing the word blindness. In reality, I only see things differently. It is just that all of you who are not color affected are in the majority and I