Red is Gray and Yellow White...

[bunchofgrapes]

A little bit of useless info about me is that I am colorblind. I'd always had my vision tested as a kid but until I went to the doctor a few years ago, I'd never had a colorblind test. Since something like .5% of women are colorblind, I guess it never occurred to anyone to test for it when I was a kid.



I took the Ishihara Color Vision test, where you see numbers instead of shapes, although I also took the other test from the site in the link. The doctor's assistant gave me the test, showing me these cards with dots on them and asking me to tell her the numbers that I saw. I didn't see any numbers. Nothing but dots. I thought she was crazy so I kept asking if there were really numbers there. She said yes, I said no, and she looked at me like I'd grown a second head. She asked me again and I told her again that I could not see any numbers. Just a bunch of dots. She then told me I was colorblind.

Finding this out at the age of 43 kinda freaked me out a little. Suddenly I'm wondering if my whole color-visioned life is a lie. Is grass really green? Is the sky really blue? And for the record, yes, I know it is--people have told me so ;-) I haven't quite figured out how being colorblind affects me. I mean, is everything copacetic as long as no one shows me cards with dots and asks me if I can see numbers or shapes? It's still a little freaky to know that there could be information or secrets lurking in signs and I can't see them. I guess this rules out being a spy. I do have this one pair of cords that I have no idea if they are gray or green. I always thought they were green but my doctor (a GP, not the eye doctor) said no, they were more of a grayish color. I didn't believe her so she paraded me through the waiting room of her office and took a poll of her staff and two waiting patients. They were more of a grayish color. Have I been mismatching my clothes all these years?

Back in July, when I was doing the family trip to CO, I happened to mention my uniqueness to my family. Here I am, thinking they will be very impressed when my sister casually says, "Oh yeah, I'm colorblind too". This is interesting because we share the same colorblind father but our mothers are different. Apparently, my dad has a thing for colorblind or carrier women. Obviously they weren't wearing dots.

Comments

[phdelicious.livejournal.com]

I find the idea of color blindness kind of fascinating because it plays into the whole - we teach our children that grass is green and the sky is blue, but how do we know what they see is actually the same as what we see - thing.

One of my friends at work is red/green colorblind and he says that he can tell the colors and shades apart from each other but can't tell you whether something is in the red family or the green family without context.