James is 13 years old.
I didn’t realise he was born with a colour defect until he was around 3 years old. On the way to preschool we used to do play games like, what number is on that front door, what colour is that car etc.
James was always good at maths (unlike me!), he was bang on with the house numbers but his colours were all mixed up, it was obvious he was guessing at the colours of the cars, sometimes he got the colour right but more often than not, it was wrong. The absolute deciders was when James and Cameron were colouring in a picture. Cameron got so cross with James because he had coloured in the sky with a pink pen. James thought it was blue ….
Not long afterwards we were waiting in Clarks shoe shop for the boys’ feet to be measured. We took the ticket from the little machine and asked James to keep an eye on the counter for our ticket number. He had no idea what we were talking about because he couldn’t see any numbers on the screen. We then found out that he couldn’t see red on a black background.
There is a history of colour deficiencies in my family. In fact, the majority of men on my mum’s side are colour deficient to some degree. To mention a few, my grandad, his brothers (so my great Uncles), my first cousin, my mum’s 1st cousins. Cameron, my youngest son has managed to escape, as has my nephew (my sister’s son). So, it seems it’s luck of the draw if you manage to avoid it! The girls carry the chromosome, but it seems to come out in the boys. It turns out, my mum is fairly unique! She’s around the 1 in 20 females who are actually colour deficient, most unusual.
After the pink sky incident, when James was 5, I decided to look into it further to try and find out what he sees. We visited an Optician near to home and James had a look at the Ishihara plates, the most common form of colour blindness test. It contains a book full of circles with dots of varying colours and numbers within them. James was only able to read the first one, which was number 12. The optician asked me if James actually knew his numbers, because only being able to see one of them is extremely rare. The poor boy just couldn’t see any more of the numbers within the dots.
I was then told that there was a high chance that James could see no colour whatsoever, in fact he could be monochrome colour deficient. So, I prepared for his life to be in black, white and shades of grey. Monochromy is extremely rare, around 1 in 300,000 people have this. We never avoided discussing colour at home, he was pretty much self-taught, he knew a banana was yellow, the sky is blue, the grass is green, strawberries are red.
We all felt absolutely devastated for him but the optician said he didn’t know any different, he had never seen any colour and would never miss it. He was right, so that’s how I explained it to everybody else. It was massive shock, we thought he could never see the green grass, the blue sky, a sunset/sunrise and all the beautiful coloured things in life which we take for granted.
As James got older, we had to explain to teachers what we thought James could see. Now, I realise it’s extremely hard to get your head round, but we described it as “imagine watching an old black and white film”, James was potentially seeing everything in sepia.
Around the age of 8 or so, James was starting to talk about some colours he could see. He thought he could see yellow and to this day, he still says his favourite colour is red (we’ve had a lot of arguments about the colour red!). As you can imagine, it was near on impossible for James to explain what he could see, he could see, what he could see and he had no idea what we could see. It was all a guessing game.
James has always struggled with the white board at school. Teachers are fans of coloured pens (actually, I think most of us are!) and PowerPoint presentations, but James was finding it impossible to read a lot of pale colours on a white background. We decided the best way of getting over this for the teachers to print everything out in black and white. It became even more complicated when more and more children were diagnosed with dyslexia and earlings (where a lot of different colours are needed on the white board)! In the latter years of primary school, James’ teachers would mark up all his colouring pencils and pens for him.
Last year we decided to get a further colour-blind test done. There aren’t’ many opticians nearby that have the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue colour vision test. This test is based on 88 coloured plates which are shown to you in 4 batches of 22. James completed one batch of 22 plates and arranged the rows of plates in the colour order he could see.
For the first time ever, we came out of there with a clearer idea of what James could see. He is what’s known as “strong protan” or protanopia. It was a massive relief to find out he DOES SEE SOME COLOUR! We see an average of 1 million colours, James sees around 220,000 of those.
Here’s the definition:
Strong Protan is one of the most challenging forms of color vision deficiency because it significantly limits the range of color compared to common forms of color blindness.
James was beginning to be able to explain what he could see. He had a real aversion to any green food, he refused to eat any green vegetables. Why would I make him anything which he saw as sludge coloured (although I did keep trying)! We stuck to carrots, sweetcorn and the occasional cauliflower. Fruit wasn’t too much of an issue, but he always preferred the red grapes to the green ones! He hated colouring in, board games and jigsaw puzzles.
Now I knew James could see some colour, I looked into the colour-blind glasses which so many people had mentioned. Last year the only supplier was online and based in the US. I decided it was too risky, the results weren’t well known and glasses for protan didn’t exist, on top of all that, they were really expensive, and we felt it could have made it worse.
So, you can imagine our joy when we heard a radio interview on BBC Radio 2 a few weeks ago. They were discussing colour deficiencies and glasses to correct it. It was the most fascinating interview I have ever heard. Jez, the optician being interviewed was based in St Albans and he is the only UK supplier of the EnChroma glasses. Michael, a third year firm student also has moderate protanomaly. He is a massive success story, you can read his blog here.
https://www.eyesonstalbans.com/enchroma-outdoor-indoor-lenses-review/
https://www.eyesonstalbans.com/radio-2/
I e-mailed the opticians straight away to see if we could have an appointment to try out the EnChroma glasses. I have a feeling they had been inundated with similar requests! Our appointment was made for 2 pm on Saturday 7 September, little did we know that appointment would be life changing …
We were all nervous and quite sceptical as we set off on Saturday morning. Lunch at Wetherspoons did little to help but it was nice to see some of Hatfield on the way through.
We arrived at EYES on St Albans for our 2 pm appointment with Jez. The optician’s shop was full of colour, it was really quite funky! We were instantly put at ease by Jez. He asked James to complete a test on his brand-new iPad. The iPad faced the window, so James had maximum clarity. The test result was “moderate protan”. We had tested James at home and he was “strong protan”, it seems daylight really can make a difference.
Jez very patiently explained exactly what the results of the test meant. We knew James had an issue with the colour cones in his eyes but we had no idea that the green cone was overlapping the red one. The glasses for protan deficiency were rolled out earlier this year. The lenses in the glasses separate the green from the red cone, hence giving a lot more colour vision. We believe James sees 20% of what we can see, with the glasses, he should be able to see around 40% of our colour vision, absolutely fantastic!
Off we went outside holding 2 pairs of glasses. The set of videos I took will explain everything else.
A massive thank you to M&S Food for letting us look around their shop! And a huge thank you to Jez for doing the interview on BBC Radio 2 and helping to change James life, and ours.
Roll on next weekend when James’ glasses are set to arrive. He is looking forward to a life with a lot more colour in it.
xx
A Microsoft Certified Professional with many years of large corporate experience and training, he now focuses on helping small businesses make the most of their IT.
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