A few days before I went into the eye doctor, a new couple moved into the house right across the street from us. I met my new neighbor on a Tuesday when she came a-knocking to inquire after a lost cat that appeared on her door nonchalantly a day later having taken some extended kitty-vacation time. The house where they live is much higher in elevation than ours as we live on the side of a hill; from my mailbox I would look up a steep incline and set of stone stairs to the balcony/deck of her front door next to which they had an irish flag proudly flying.
On that fateful thursday I arrived home from the eye doctor stunned and floating on my pink cloud. I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened my door, stepped out, happened to look up....
and there it was.
My new neighbors had hung a new flag from the center of their balcony, freshly hung from the look of it. It was a black background with a pirate's skull and cross bones snapping proudly in the brisk, entirely uncomfortable February breeze. This Jolly Roger however, was special. It grinned at me with an empty black smile but instead of two black eyes, this little charmer stared down at me with one eye, his right eye covered by a white patch. I stared him down with my good eye, left eye glaring at left eye and finally relented to life's little joke. I smiled at the Jolly Roger- "you and me both buddy".
Monday was ten times worse than any surgery could possibly be. We arrived in the clinic bright and early at 7AM where I expected to sit in the waiting room next to the crickets who would certainly be chirping to break up the silence of a doctor's waiting room at such an ungodly hour. As we stepped through the elevator doors of floor 14 however, I was greeted, to my horror, by a sea of eye-suffering humanity, fifty or so people in total who had arrived more punctually than I, aaaaall waiting to see the same very important person.
After an hour and a half or so of waiting to be called, most of which I spent wondering exactly how many North Korean torture specialists they had flown in to be on the task force to create the uniquely excruciating purple chairs in the waiting room, they finally called me in and plopped me into a closet with a curtain where I read (or failed to read) more letters off of walls. Then my nice guy-tech dropped me off in a smaller, squarer exam room where I waited again, giving me time to flesh out my hypothesis that it MUST have been North Koreans, for only a society on the heels of three egomaniacal dictators and centuries of refined torture under various emperors could they have created something so just-uncomfortable-enough as to make white suburbanites like myself feel like they're in socially acceptable stress positions.
Then all at once, busy with my conspiracy theories and halfway through a James Rollins book, my doctor took me by surprise, bearing down on me like a gale force wind. She was a tiny, birdlike woman with an energy that belied her advanced age and a handshake that could shatter glass (Shannon Sheron would've been proud). Behind her scurried 5 minions, all most likely brilliant in their own right, and all buzzing about her in that particular kind of terrified way that you last saw on silver screen in the devil wears prada. She introduced herself as briskly as she'd shaken hands and peered into my eye. "More dilation" she announced, "two more drops". I made the mistake of mentioning I hadn't been dilated in the first place and the room went still in horror. She swept out almost wordlessly, as quickly as she had come and I thought I heard someone call down the long corridor "heaaaaaaaaaads wiiiiiiiiiiiill rrrooooooooooollll" (I might have imagined that part). One of the minions came back and dilated me and after another half hour or so she arrived and picked up where she had left off. We went through the normal routine of light shining and look-rights-lefts-ups-downs, then she took a seat at her desk where a diagram of an eye was waiting for her notes. The most privileged of the minions stood directly behind her shoulder and held her colored pencils as she barked "red!" "brown" and filled in particularly important veins and iris pigmentations on her diagram. I imagined that the girl must have nightmares about handing her the wrong colored pencil one day as I dream sometimes about constantly forgetting my customer's orders.
Once she had finished her diagram and my pupils were larger that a heroin junkie's she preformed more tests all of which "should be comfortable" which, judging from the chairs, I should've know to be a lie. One particularly painful poke to the eyeball with a camera later and I let out a large theater-worthy gasp, which set the minions racing for more numbing drops and I was off the hook for a while. She explained that I needed to go through a barrage of testing and photos which would take between 6 and 8 hours at which point we would rendezvous to discuss the diagnosis. This began with a woman in possession of a large lensed camera taking pictures of my face at closer and closer intervals. I stared at the camera with my very nastiest look, the one I reserve for customers who complain about me or people who annoy me on public buses. I was hoping to break the camera but it was a Nikon, so no luck there.
Then commenced another few hours of waiting, during which I got much farther into my book and incrementally closer to rupturing a disk in my back on the purple chairs. Finally came my last group of tests during which I had to assert my independence as an adult and refuse a peocedure that sounded suspiciously non-critical that involved injecting dye into me and paying a large chunk of extra money out of pocket. I hate needles and more importantly had been warned that the dye might turn me "slightly yellow". Needless to say I had already come to the conclusion that Wills eye hospital was very good at diagnosing and curing eye conditions and very bad at accurately using their adjectives. I had been listening to other lab techs pitch said test to their respective patients and from the corner of my ear had discerned that the test was not technically vital so stood my ground when my tech tried to press. This made me feel like I was fighting the man. I soon realized that this had been a mistake when she laid me back in a chair and said "now for this last test....." and proceeded to numb my eye, clamp open the lids, fill the open eye with gel and plop a very large, vaguely pointy, camera directly on the eyeball. I took 4 deep, dignified, centering, yoga breaths before completely hyperventilating as something began to poke me and squeaked that she "needed to get this thing off me. NOW". My perky torturer-in-training did not like this and informed me, annoyed that if I were to "just go and panic like that again" I would scratch my eye. The poke had really hurt and the machine squishing my eyeball was very large. I felt justified in my panic. I gave her the same look i'd given the camera and envisioned ripping off her brown pony tail and feeding it to her for a second. Then in my best Robert DeNiro impression I shrugged, wiped my gel-y teary eyes and stalked out hoping she slipped and fell on her way home. They let me back in with the general population and I saw an old lady make a sign to ward off evil spirits when she saw my face (this is a lie). My saintly mother fetched me a breakfast sandwich and and orange juice from Starbucks which I devoured like a famine victim, pre-frozen egg product and all, feeling like a character out of a snickers bar commercial. Clearly I was not myself when I was hungry.
It was not too long after (in Wills eye clinic standard time that is) that I was called back into an examination room and remarked to my mom that we were really superior to the average patient and had made it through our ordeal in around a mere 6 hours. It was at this point that I should have remembered my own advice in the previous post and kicked myself for prematurely expressing positive conjectures. Or at least I should've knocked on wood... although in that mecca of formica and sheet metal the closest I would've come would've been my own skull. First I was "next" the "after the next two people" then "next again". When my original tech came in to dilate my eyes (perhaps to make up for having forgotten originally?) I came close to a tantrum when I explained to him that we were waiting for a diagnosis, not just beginning the process. He left the room, having lost his head and roses to the red then white queen in this crazy wonderland and at last, after 2 hours, Dr. Shields again swept in with her posse of junior geniuses.
Petty frustrations aside, I knew the moment we had come for had arrived and I did my best to look less hostile and more like a brave adult, not a little girl who cried when you poked her with eye cameras. She told me the tumor was the size of a pea, and like the infamous occupant of the princess' mattress, this one had big consequences. Only this time I was the princess, the one no one hears about, who had NOT felt the pea beneath those 70 sertas, I had finally come out a loser.
She told me it was a malignant melanoma, a large one as melanomas go, and that my choices consisted of removing the eye or attempting a radioactive plaque treatment; a fairly non-invasive completely brilliant treatment (that I believe she may have had a hand in creating and implementing- she really is THE best) that would put me out of commission for a week but most likely leave me with a viable working eye afterwards.
Now this left me in a tricky position: knowing I had cancer terrified me in a way no pink mist was going to carry me away from. Hearing you have cancer turns your insides into the kind of emotional 4 year old who promptly pees themselves or puts their hands over their ears and yells "no no no!". But looking back on my life in a millisecond, all my triumphs, failures, flaws, and features, my eyes were the only thing I could remember always liking about myself. It felt unbearably, unfairly, hugely impossible to lose such a thing. Who would say I had a beautiful "eye"? No one sings "you with the stars in your...eye"? Jeepers, creeepers, where'd you get those....peeper? It wasn't even grammatically correct.
When I came back to reality, less than a beat had passed and I stared at her with the all of the combined power of those two eyes as she explained the process of the operation, its success rates, and side effects. I stared so hard I thought I'd zoom in on her pores any second. I focused on not crying. I refused to melt down in front of Dr. Shields and the junior geniuses. I didn't move, I didn't breathe, I didn't swallow. Only four tears fell during that diagnosis and I hated every one. I reasoned that they had fallen less than one per 60 seconds and forgave myself. A well-meaning minion handed me a tissue but unwittingly stepped into the path of the hard stare and was vaporized (not really).
I kept waiting for the fog, where or where was my pink fog to take me away from this? She was telling me that her first priority was to save my life. Her second to save my eye. Her third to....well I don't remember the third one, I guess it was really more on her list than mine. I was mostly about one and two. She was asking me which course of treatment I wanted to pursue.
No question.
The operation.
She was telling me about injections I would need in my eye to help it recover from the radiation every four months for 2 years. Needles. In my eyes. More than once. And the goddamn pink fog was no where to be seen. In the absence of emotional lockdown, once we had made it through all the necessary dialogue I did the next best thing.
I asked her for xanax. In her defense she was neither surprised nor did she crack a smile, which is notable because I had asked in the same voice someone else might've politely requested her to pass the tea. Every vowel in place. Every consonant enunciated. I wasn't afraid (I was scared shitless) and I was going to make sure she knew it. Dr. Shields poked people in the eyes and played with eyeballs for a living. She was the best at it. And as she clearly had no gag-reflex I could go toe to toe with her on stiff upper lips. Or eyebrows. Or whatever. I would let her put her poisonous contact lens in my eye and sew it shut for a week. I would take my eye shots like a pro and then someday when I was done beating cancer and rich and famous I would swoop in with my own army of minions and bring her a bouquet of some exotic flowers that look like eyeballs in thanks.
And we would scowl at each other in mutual understanding. And I would know it had been worth it. Maybe I'd give her that Jolly Roger flag too.
