I have for a very long time, had a vague suspicion that making statements like that one invites nothing but trouble. Perhaps its a paranoia brought on by reading too many books and investing too much time in movies and serial television shows. Maybe its a slavic fatalism inherited along with my polish/bulgarian roots. Regardless of the source I walk through life knocking on wood and throwing salt over my shoulder because hey? Why not be on the safe side. Logical or not, this mentality seems to have gotten me through life pretty unscathed. Attribute it to my salt throwing, divine providence, or perhaps that I tend towards the cautious (with the exception of one unfortunate roof-jumping incident that effectively squished my disastrous leap towards risk taking). That said, the fact remains, in spite of my disproportionate intake of crime dramas and John Grishm novels, the dramatic and the terrible seem to generally bypass my quiet little cul-de-sac of life.
I have worn glasses or contacts for the majority of the years of my life that have counted. They were a great source of chagrin in my awkward "stage" of late childhood/early adolescence/late adolescence/early adulthood, but had become more like a nuisance by the time I reached my "truly adult" 20s; an expense for contact solution and lenses, glasses to wear at night when absolutely no one would see them, etc. When my vision got worse it did not particularly alarm me, even the big, red, angry veins in my right eye seemed like a result of 10-14 hours a day lens use. After my vision began to become cloudy, like one of those claritin commercials I knew something must be up. Some days I spent as if I was looking through life through a film, like a lens with a big finger print on the surface. Since I am a responsible adult I only waited around three months and two google searches on my symptoms (which brought me to the logical conclusion that I had no fewer that 5 serious communicable diseases and conditions and was, in fact, already dead) before I walked into an eye shop owned by a friend and old co-worker who owned a local eyeglass shop. In the little closet of an office a very serious professional young eye doctor showed me a long parade of letters of varying sizes before moving on through the litany of "this versus that" that determines your eye perscription. I expected him to tell me that I was just getting a bit more blind. I expected him to tell me that the little black area at the top right of my field of vision in my right eye was my eyebrow and I was being crazy. So when he pushed his chair back and said that it was a retinal tear or a tumor I nodded doubtfully as if someone had just told me man had discovered life on mars and then squinted through dilated eyes at him to see if perhaps I had heard him incorrectly. When I realized he was serious, a sort of pillowy perplexing fog seemed to rise up and trickle through my brain like nerve gas. A retinal tear? A tumor? That meant surgery or surgery. I went home and told Gilson in tears. Then the pink fog took over and I wondered numbly if perhaps while they were down there they could just zap my lenses as well, a sort of two for one tumor sucking, lasiking deal. Did they sell groupons for eye surgery?
I should've known when they had me in the UW eye surgery clinic less than 24 hours later that a 2 for one eye slicing special was probably a bit unrealistic. A very impressive, brisk eye surgeon named Dr. Chin turned my head this way and that and shone lights into my eyes until I lost my vision and felt one of my eyes break away from tracking up the other and roll around like a marble in the socket. A long series of tests later confirmed that there was indeed a mass inside my eye that had no business belonging there.
Several years ago, an optometrist had taken a peek inside my peepers and had told me that my eyes were different. A congenital birth defect had left pigment splashed across the iris of my right eye leaving a dark stripe in which there were capillaries that ended in little starbursts. Most people, he explained to me, had one or two. I had over fifty. I had stars in my eyes, he told me. It reminded me of that old Rosemary Clooney song "heeeeeyyyyy youuuu with the stars in your eyes" that my grandparents sang to me. It made me feel special. Now the doctor was telling me that it was perhaps one of these stars that was blooming out of control, causing internal ocular swelling that blurred my vision and caused that creeping black sliver that pulsed in my upper right field of sight like a shadow that disappears when you tried to look at it. He told me he'd never seen anything like it and dropped the bomb that I would need to travel to see a surgeon who specialized in such things. My heart hit my shiny black boots and felt a little afraid through the pink fog. It wasn't until I had to verbalize the results of our visit to my friends and family that I started to feel it, still there, heavy and dripping on my shoes. The word "tumor" frightened everyone. It frightened me. To us it meant my aunt Mary-Sue, frail and in a wheelchair riddled with lukemia. It meant my Grandma Smith who beat breast cancer only to lose her life to the same disease decades later. Not even the pink fog muffled the sounds those memories made. They told me I needed to go to see Carol Shields of the willis eye hospital in Philadelphia and I thought, ridiculously,
"I'm Luke Skywalker. They're sending me to see Yoda on planet Dagoba, the only one who can truly teach me the ways of the eye tumor force" first and then "jesus christ I hope my x-wing makes it there before this goddamn thing eats my eye".
The next two weeks were equal parts miserable and completely normal. I went about my daily life and tried to sidestep my penchant for the dramatic. I was ludicrously afraid that I would tell everyone I had eye cancer which not only sounded silly but that would invite such a fate to befall me. Or even more ridiculously, that I would tell everyone I had dramatic eye cancer that turned out to be a big eye freckle on genetic crack. So I tried to keep it under wraps. I cried in 120 second bursts, mostly when I talked to Gilson, who sweetly promised me that everything would work out regardless. The little black sliver in my upper right eye grew and soon it was a big black oval, something I could look away from. It followed me just like the anxiety crept up behind my psyche like an old injury that hurts when you turn just so. The tremendously good news that the hospital participated in various programs that would fly us out for free, put us up with a nice jewish couple in the burbs, and send us back home again lifted spirits that would fall right back down when I received the informational brochures that proclaimed optimistically "cancer patients fly free!" across the cover. I talked myself down thinking of the different scans and tests they could've run (and certainly would have run?) to see if I was riddled with similar tumors in traditional cancer prone areas. It was another blow when we realized that without a valid Washington ID Gilson was going to be unable to accompany me. In his stead, my mom came to keep me company and support me and in her wonderful way, she had all of the details of our trip nailed down and in military order within the week. I was grateful that she handled it. The thought of arranging tickets and reservations and rental cars and appointments scared me more than the surgery that they scheduled for the thursday following my exam.
Those two weeks passed with an unbearably slow quickness, arriving just as I felt I couldn't stand the wait any longer but would do anything to postpone the departure. On Saturday night I was a half-step above catatonic at work and took advantage of our big screen TVs to drown myself in repeat episodes of AMCs "vikings" to the tune of 9.15$ an hour. I had felt as though once the trip started I would burst into a million little pieces but discovered that my foggy brain didn't stop my feet from proceeding on in front of the other and in fact, all of the rest of my body parts seemed to be functioning with equal capability, shedding doubt on my need to think as frenetically as I do all of the time to keep me going. The flights were long and mildly boring, I made it most of the way through two different books but retained fairly little as my brain tripped behind the pages as they turned. Philadelphia, once we arrived, seemed rather unremarkably like other urban city centers with the exception of a very large ornate building that made for a pretty view outside our window. My feet led me to the foot of the bed in our hotel room where I sit right now writing this, half asleep and in some calm alternate dimension that one discovers after traveling through three time zones after springing forward and so thoroughly confusing my body clock that it crashes faster than internet explorer on a PC. Tomorrow I have another barrage of testing and light-shining at the entirely uncivilized hour of 7AM, which is in 4 hours, philly time. 4 hours of sleep or 4 hours until I end this not-knowing; I haven't decided how I want to think of it. As I rub my tired eyes and peer through the blurry edged parallelogram that remains visible beneath the black shadow I still seem high up above it. Sitting on a pink perplexed cloud. Watching someone else's dramatic life unfold chapter after chapter. Until tomorrow-
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