S*cks to Be Me (#1): The Eye

Hello, Everyone,

So, a few of you have asked “Where the ding-dong doodlewoops have you been these last few years and how come you haven’t had time to write Xcargo? I mean, would it kill you to call once in a while? Let us know if you’re alive or dead? I mean, REALLY.”

The answer to your question is simple. I’ve been busy. Very busy. VERY busy. As in oh-jeez-ya-gotta-be-kidding busy. As in, “Come on, I couldn’t make this stuff up” busy. Or, at least, couldn’t make it up unless I was on serious drugs while watching horror movie DVDs and juggling running chain saws and walking a tight rope. Over a blast furnace. Or Dick Cheney. Six of one…

Anyway, so just to bring you up to speed, and provide a little insight into my existence, I’ve decided to do a new series of columns that will relate the story of my life, and the lives of my loved ones, from November 2008 to New Year’s Day 2009.

I call it, “S*cks To Be Me,” and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it as much as I didn’t.

It’ll give us yet another interest in common.


*

So, as I say this is my history of the last few months. Now, truth to be told, I may not get all the details right, but that’s ‘cause my brain is fried. But, not to worry, no trans-fats were harmed in the process.

Where was I? Oh, yes. So I hadn’t had an eye exam in a few years and I had noticed that my vision was getting a little worse. Probably needed new lenses, I said to myself. And, oh, by the way, I’ve been nearsighted since I was about six. My parents wondered if I might have a slight vision problem when I started walking into walls. But, of course, they couldn’t be certain because given a kid as spacey as I was, well, you know, walking into walls is par for the course. (THUMP. “Oh, he’s in the living room. Check the TV, would you?”)

So, anyway, I make an appointment to see (or, least, stare blearily at) my local optometrist. She has me sit down at look at one of those of little vision charts. “Okay, with just the right eye, read the lowest line you can see.”

“AQZIB.”

“Fine. Now the left eye.”

“F …I…R…E…E…X…I …T.”

“Uh, Mr. Tucker?”

“Yes?”

“That’s the sign over the door.”

“There’s a door?”


*

Then, after the exam, she said cheerily, “You have a cataract in your left eye that’s the size of dinner plate and could result in total blindness unless it is treated now.”

“Ack,” I said, wittily. “Erk,” I added, perceptively.

“So,” she continued, “what they’ll have to do is gash your eye open with a rusty fish knife, pop the old lens out with a grapefruit spoon, and stick in a coke bottle bottom as a replacement.”

Well, actually, that ISN’T what she said.

Actually, what she said was, “Cataract surgery these days is an outpatient procedure, totally painless, and then afterwards you’ll have nearly perfect vision in that eye.”

But, that’s not what I heard.

Still, as my former dissertation committee members said just before they threw me out of their Ph.D. program, reality is Socially Constructed and ergo in the eye of the beholder.

Or, in this case, the cataract.


*

I wobbled out of her office and into the lobby.

The Doctor, sensing (perhaps) my discomfort—maybe it was the fits of uncontrollable hysterical weeping, but you never can tell—followed me out and reassured me about the surgery and explained that her diagnosis really was great news because my insurance would pay for it all and afterwards I’d have things like depth perception. Which is a handy if you are, say, driving and you happen to discover (just a little too late) that the big blur to the left is actually a 16-wheeler hauling toxic waste, high explosives, radioactive isotopes, and several large crates of crazed attack gerbils. Who are grumpy. All at the same time.

Okay, I said, and started the process of making appointments. When all was said and done, I was set up to go on December 15.


*

I then headed for home—wrestling, as I went, with a major attack of sheer, unadulterated, super-charged, purified, new and improved . . . terror.

Here’s why. I have an interest in history. I’m not, according to my former dissertation committee, a Fer-Real historian. That requires a level of mental constipat…eh, that is, scholarship for which God or Nature did not prepare me.

But, I do have just enough knowledge of the past to be all too aware of what cataract surgery USED to be like.

Now, today, it really is an outpatient procedure. You go in. They sedate you. The doctor makes a micro-incision and performs the repair. Then, the incision closes up all by itself. When I had mine done, I was reading again that evening.

BUT, that’s today.

Not that long ago, it was quite a different story. And not a pretty one.

It used to be that cataract surgery was a major undertaking involving fun things like the total removal of lens in the eye, stitches in the eye itself, and, then, wearing huge glasses for the rest of your life. And you still didn’t see so good.

Did I mention the STITCHES in your eyeball?

Think about that a little. Go ahead. Savor the image.

*

It didn’t help matters that when I was very, very young, I actually saw a couple of people who’d had this kind of surgery. I remember one of them, a little man who worked at a newsstand downtown, whose lenses where so thick and so powerful that his eyes seemed vast, as though they occupied half his face.

I’m sure he was a really nice guy. But, to me in all my vast experience as a four-year-old . . . he looked like something out of a Japanese Monster Movie.

*

Now, as I understand it, modern cataract surgery only began in 1949—just sixty years ago, as of this writing. I’m 51, remember, so that’s not too long before I was born. Or, anyway, way too close for comfort.

But, taking up the story again, ‘round abouts ‘49, a British doctor noticed the interesting fact that when some British pilots had gotten bits of their Plexiglas cockpit domes into their eyes during crashes and dust-ups with the Beastly Hun (that was back before Germans were cool again), the material was “inert.” That means the eyes didn’t seem to mind the stuff being in there.

Well, if that was so—thought the good doctor—then you could build a new lens out of transparent plastic and put it into the eye itself. Good-by coke bottle bottom glasses. And good riddance.

But, you still had to get the eye open first. With a knife. And then close it up afterwards.

Did I mention STITCHES in the eyeball?

Good. Just checking.

*

So, all through my childhood, the standard operating procedure for cataract surgery was that they performed the operation with a (gulp) scalpel, then they sewed up your eye (double gulp), and then they put you in a bed with sandbags on either side of your head. So you couldn’t roll over. And disturb the stitches.

As in STITCHES.

As in little bits of string. Sewn into and through your eyes.

As in . . . ARGH.


*

But, all through the 1960s and 1970s, doctors figured out new and better ways of opening up the eye, removing the cataract, and installing a new lens. By the 1980s and 1990s, it was painless. And they’d figured out how to do microsurgery so they didn’t have to open up your eye with razor blade any more. And they’d come up with soft lenses that can slip into the eye with a minimum of fuss.

Actually, the lenses are pretty terrific all by themselves. They fold in half, you see, so they can enter the eye through an incision no bigger than a ladybug’s left nostril.

Very cool, really.

*

So, today, except in extreme cases, cataract surgery is quick, painless, easy, and completely safe.

And my rational, logical, coherent, and well-informed brain knew all that.

Except…except …

My irrational brain was going…

THEY ARE GOING TO PUT STITCHES IN MY EYE!!!!

*

While driving, and well before I got home, I had also invented this fascinating image . . .

Basically Freddy Kruger in a white coat. With a dental drill. Talking about corneas.

Ah, the gift of a vivid imagination. Wonderful, really.

*

Anyway, that’s where I was, psychic-spacewise. Not a great place, but, what the heck (I figured), at least I’ve made the appointment. Might as well get it over with. And, besides . . . besides . . . after that shock, the day just couldn’t get worse. I mean, it just couldn’t.

Could it?

Naw. Not possible.

So thinking, I pulled into my driveway and looked up the walk to the door. And, there, in the box, was . . .

The Mail.

But that’s for next time.

*

Onward and upward.
























Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker