What happened to my brain and I can't see well?

I have been very curious about what happened to my brain that resulted in  right homonymous hemianopsia. I wanted to know the exact location of the injury caused by the stroke. I felt that my right eye was not working well, yet I knew that both eyes could not see the right side of the visual field. I wanted to see a picture of what was going on. 

 Eventually, one of the neurologists I saw looked at my MRI and drew a rough picture of the brain and the location of the stroke for me.  His picture inspired me to search online for "maps" of the brain that showed areas of damage to the visual pathways and the resulting visual defects.

A Google search showed me a variety of images and drawings that have to do with Hemianopsia.  I chose two drawings to include here:

The first one comes from a website called "StudyBlue.com"  that offers digital study tools to students.   It is part of the neurology notes of Jared Rickert, a student of osteopathy at  Still University. (Click here to see his notes).

I chose this diagram because it is very simple and clear.  It shows a brain that has been sliced at the level of the visual system.  The eyes are in front. Optic nerves come out of each eye.  The nerves from the right side of each eye carry information about what is on the left side of the visual field.  These nerves go around the right side of the brain all the way to the visual cortex on the back of the brain.  The nerves from the left side of each eye carry information from the right side of the visual field.  These nerves go around the left side of the brain back to the visual cortex.  That is the reason why someone with an injury to the left side of the brain, like myself, becomes blind to the right side of the visual field.  

The black lines with the numbers next to them represent damages or "cuts" to the nerves from stroke or brain injury. Each "cut" is numbered and corresponds to a particular visual defect that is drawn in the numbered circles to the right.  The dark area in each circle is the area that is blind.  

A person who has had a field of vision test and was diagnosed with a visual field defect, can look at the picture above (or the one below) and find in a general way where the damage that caused the defect is located.  The drawing above  shows what happens when the damage is on the right side of the brain, which affects the left field of vision.  When the damage is on the left side of the brain, the right field of vision is affected in a similar way. 

• To see and explore additional drawings of visual field defects and other Hemianopsia images from Google Search, click here.
• A chapter on Visual Fields by Robert H. Spector in a textbook on Clinical Methods has a very good medical description of the location in the brain of particular field defects and their consequences. (Click here  to read the chapter).