Maybe This Will Work?
...and other heroic, exhausting and painful efforts at trying to stave off blindness.
The weekly treatments happened like this:
I’d start out in the lobby of the eye hospital, a gothic building pretty far down and pretty far east in NYC, a block-length monolith structure with cascading window cavalcades and rusted metal chain over every window.
Inside it was a maze. A miasma of speckled brown hallways dotted with pre-war archways into rooms that processed and funneled the crowds into ever-smaller waiting rooms and eventually, after hours, to doctors. The first floor was emergency, triage, and basic care, and every floor up led deeper and deeper into the heart of specialization.
I was assigned to the top floor: Retina.
The retina is a layer of cells just one-half of one millimeter thick. This incomprehensibly tiny interface does the monumental task of making sense of the light and images that come toward us, it sends this “sense-making” further back, into our brain (and in fact, our retinas are actually made of brain tissue) which in turn gifts us with the delightful experience we call, “comprehension”.
Thus, when the retina starts to falter, so does our ability to comprehend what we see.
There is no greater thrill and challenge than being a retina doctor, or so I’m told. The wild west of eye surgery is made of the men and women who want to do the impossible on the regular, cure blindness.
But those days I was barely reckoning with the fact that I was going - had gone - blind.
“Just hop into that chair", Brian the nurse gestured toward the lighter-colored area a few feet in front of me and I stared.
“Chair?” I repeated.
“Yes, hun,” Brian’s saccharine tone betrayed his impatience, “that’s a chair, hop on in, doc’s coming soon.”
I found the chair by the glint of its metallic side-arm, a depth of difference between tan and silver helped guide me. It was like a dentist’s chair, with a more elaborate headrest. The room seemed - as far as I could tell - otherwise dark, a blessing of the retina floor where they presumed (graciously) the photosensitivity of their patients.
Dr. Diaz came in. I picked up his scent. He smelled always of sex and aftershave and had a voice like an afternoon picnic with a barely detectable Puerto Rican lilt.
“Okay love, let’s get going,” He muttered.
I pushed my back into the headrest and felt the soft cushioned sides restrain me. His cold hands pulled back my lids and dropped in the blissful numbing medication (these were the moments, amidst the relief, that I’d remember to notice how much pain I was usually in).
“Stare at that corner,” he said, ostensibly pointing though I had no idea where.
Nevertheless, I picked a spot in the blur and did my best to commit myself wholly to looking there and not moving.
He put in the plastic speculum and announced himself as he was doing it, to assuage my anxiety. “Speculum”, I repeated and started to laugh.
“Three…” he started to count, cutting off my laughter, “Two… and…
One!”
“Injection going in” and, as he gripped my chin, I felt his breath on my face as he whispered, very softly, “don’t move…”.
The hollow needle went straight through the white of my eye, journeyed like a careful bee, buzzing and gently alighting onto its bed of pollen. The needle pushed past, layer by layer, vital vitreous, the precious anatomy that made staring into the faces of my children possible until they did not. Until I grasped and faltered over comprehending the nature of a chair, the contours of all beauty lost to me.
Week after week Dr. Diaz and I met for this interlude. I scuttled insecurely, and eventually with a cane toward the chair, he held me back and stuck a syringe in my eye, injecting a time-release capsule into the space behind my retina, a tiny bomb of anti-inflammatory drugs left at the doorstep of the hardest-to-reach bit of tissue in the human body.
The injections seemed to go on forever, and I was there, restrained and frozen in space, waiting out the interminable push of the plunger, willing my mind to wander, often prone to wondering why my doctor smelled the way he did (and I imagined with deep generosity, presuming his wife loved and admired him so much she drove in from Connecticut each morning to make love to him on his desk).
Eventually, it would end. The syringe out, the doctor would squeeze my shoulder with some benign affection and suddenly I’d be alone.
Reeling in the darkness, the ghost of the syringe, a bit of blood on my lid and cheek, and the incomprehensibility of it all, for weeks, for months, for years. Throwing up hail marys like the rain against the barred eighth floor windows.
(Excerpt from the upcoming book “Stuck Blind”. The story of one woman’s journey through blindness and into embracing life - in all its glorious insanity and mediocrity).
Good dramatic style and development imho
I could see a lifetime movie out of it