I think it’s time to go back to the eye doctor. Every straight line I look at doesn’t look straight. It has a dent, like this:
I’ve mentioned my vision problems before. I used to have great vision. I suppose most people can make the same claim.
My ocular dysfunction started at the beginning of my senior year in college. I was still licking my wounds after being dumped like a bag of week-old garbage by my longtime girlfriend. It came as a shock to me. It especially shocked me when I found out I was being replaced by a grad student who studied fish. That’s right, an ichthyologist. You know the type. Apparently, based on what she told me in the 14-second phone call, I wasn’t fulfilling her intellectual needs and she needed someone with greater mental abilities.
So, to try and move on with my social life I took a job doing cooking and checking IDs at a new bar that had opened on campus. An odd pairing of job functions, but it worked. I got to eat for free the nights I worked and being the doorman gave me the opportunity to meet lots of new and interesting people (read: girls).
Things were going along smoothly, but one night I noticed I couldn’t see very well out of my left eye. I had “floaters” in my field of vision. I later found out these were little droplets of blood. I went to the eye doctor and he told me I had diabetic retinopathy – a problem diabetics sometimes develop in which new, brittle blood vessels start growing on the retina and then rupture, hemorrhaging blood when the body’s blood pressure rises through exertion or from other stimuli. Within a couple of weeks I had the problem in both eyes.
The doctor I was seeing in my college town seemed like he was up on all the latest procedures and scientific advances in the field. I think it’s a requirement for being a doctor in a college town. He told me I needed to have a new laser treatment done on my eyes. This was 1977 and still a time when I heard laser, I thought of James Bond strapped to a gold table with a laser slowly moving toward the Bond family jewels. This, as Aurich Goldfinger is telling Bond he doesn’t expect him to talk. He expects him to die. Lasers beaming into my eye still had that futuristic, experimental, and yet, obscenely painful connotation to me. Call me juvenile.
But I was assured it wasn’t too bad and the local college doc gave me a referral for a couple of doctors back in Chicago. Coincidentally, a friend of mine’s dad was a diabetic and he had just had the same problem and the same procedure with great results, so home I went.
The retina specialist examined me and concurred with the previous diagnosis and treatment. He told me I would need three or four of these laser treatments. He explained that what the laser does is burn away those newly forming blood vessels forcing the blood to flow through the older, stronger, rupture-resistant ones. Seemed to make sense to me. The doctor was a short lil’ fellow with a Napoleon complex, but he was supposed to be very good at this procedure.
The first session wasn’t too bad. The worst part of it was probably the clamp used to hold my eye open for what seemed like decades at a time. The laser treatment was relatively painless. I went home after the first session with a dull headache and a patch over my eye. I was told I could remove the patch after 24 hours.
The next afternoon I eyed the clock (so to speak) all day until the unveiling time arrived. I removed the patch, opened my eye and immediately shouted, “Shit!!” It was like looking through a cardboard paper towel roll. I had no peripheral vision on the left and limited peripheral vision on the right. I called the doctor’s office and because it was Saturday, had to wait for someone to call back. The doctor on call phoned me shortly and I told him what I was seeing. Or not seeing. I could hear him rustling papers, most likely my file. He finally said that considering where my problem was located, a significant portion of my retina had to be burned away to prevent bleeding, and that portion would affect both my left and right peripheral vision. I asked him if they, meaning the doctor who wielded the laser, knew this beforehand and he said, “Oh yes, didn’t he tell you?” A plethora of smart-ass replies jumped into my mind but I withheld them. I told him I didn’t have any idea this was going to happen. He said if this wasn’t done, I’d end up being completely blind.
I was actually able to accept that fact rather easily – the lesser of two evils and all that. But, as I’ve mentioned before, I just would have liked to have known this before I took the patch off and half my vision was gone. Now you can call me juvenile and difficult.
I had three more treatments on that eye with no more significant loss of vision.
That is, if I don’t count portions right in the middle of my sightline.
The right eye was a little more difficult. Because the problem on that retina was occurring near the optic nerve, they couldn’t do the laser treatment. Instead, they were going to do cryo-surgery. Something else that sounded like it came from a James Bond movie. This time they were going to slice my eye open, remove the contents and with frozen gas, burn the offending areas of the retina. Then they put the pieces back in with some new, manmade eye-jelly and things should be okey-dokey. It sounded almost pleasant if it wasn’t being done to ME! Oh yeah, I also had to be awake for this one.
A couple weeks later I find myself lying face up on an operating table. Head locked in place by some vice-like contraption, straps to hold my hands down, and another one of those damned clamps holding my eye open. Did you ever see the movie A Clockwork Orange? They use those same clamps to hold open the eyes of the main character while they try to rehabilitate him. They’re really quite unpleasant.
As the procedure begins I see a scalpel coming down toward my eye. I quickly realize the straps are on my hands to keep me from defending myself. It’s not easy watching a highly-sharpened blade come down, touch, and then cut your eye. To be honest, it doesn’t hurt. It’s just the thought of it. Apparently, I was thinking about it too much because a few minutes later I started feeling nauseous. I made the pronouncement that I thought I was going to vomit to a synchronized chorus of “NO!!!” It seems if I did puke, they would have to let me turn my head, and if I did turn my head and toss my cookies, the few contents of my right eye that were still in place would go sailing across the operating room. Instead, they gave me oxygen, which calmed my stomach and they completed the operation.
Unfortunately, the results weren’t too good. The surgery was done on the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, 1979 and Dr. Hobbit, was taking a long weekend off. He told me to keep the patch on until I came into his office Tuesday.
Tuesday came and as he was about to remove the patch I asked, “Will I lose any peripheral vision this time?” He assured me I wouldn’t. The patch came off and I could see – nothing. Couldn’t see a damned thing. Blackness, and more blackness. Without examining my eye he told me to give it a couple of days. I suggested he look in my eye to see if something was wrong. He assured me he didn’t have to. Uh-huh. It was no better the next day or the day after that. By Friday I insisted that he take a look and he did. His examination found the retina had come completely detached and it was too late to do anything about it.
The fact was, I could accept all of this. A little vision was much better than no vision, which is where I would have been had this all happened to me 10 years earlier. It was just the attitude of the doctor that got to me. I could go on much longer about him but I won’t. Suffice it to say he’s still in practice in the Chicago area.
My ex-girlfriend actually showed up later that day. I was sitting on the front porch, admittedly feeling a bit sorry for myself when she pulled up. By now I was well over her but I was intrigued by why she was coming by. She told me she wanted me to come to her wedding. When I stopped laughing I told her in no uncertain terms that I did not wish to partake in the nuptials. She told me I was immature and stormed away.
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