S*cks To Be Me (#7): The Eye

Okay, folks. Here is where the shitake hits the ocular. Here’s where yours truly comes face to retina with the Giant Basketball-Sized Mutant Bat-Winged Red-Glowing Flying Eyeball (from Hell) and afterwards becomes a Bionic Bifocal Cyborg (eat your heart out, Terminator).

In short, this is where I have cataract surgery.


*

Okay, let’s have a quick recap. You’ll recall from way, way back at the start of this series that I have cataracts. I’m young to have ‘em (I’m 52 as of this writing) but I got ‘em just the same.

So, that means I gotta have surgery to get ‘em out. Specifically, I had to have surgery on the left eye. The right one’s probably going to follow in a few years.

Now, as you’ll also recall, it turns out that these days cataract surgery is pretty simpld. It is even an outpatient procedure. They give you some very cool drugs, wheel you into a special room, use advanced tools to open a micro-incision in the eye (so small it doesn’t even bleed), remove the old lens, and insert a new one. You’re out in a few minutes. No pain. Lots of gain.

And I knew all that. Knew it inside and out. Had thoroughly researched it. Talked to doctors. Talked to other people who’d had the procedure. Yep. You betacha.

And ya wanna know what?

I was, more or less, with admitted exceptions, and adding the necessary qualifications…

Scared shitless.

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As you may further recall from the beginning of this seemingly interminable series, I was scared because I am just old enough, and just enough of an historian, to know that not long ago cataract surgery wasn’t that simple. Just a few decades ago, it was major ordeal involving a whole lot of knives, quite a bit of blood and suffering, and then, afterwards, stitches in your eyes

As in stitches.

As in FREAKING STITCHES.

As in OH CHRIST FREAKING GODDAMN JUST KILL ME NOW AND GET IT OVER WITH.

Whimper.

I’m so glad I’m good at dealing with stress.


*

So, there’s all sorts of stuff I have to do _ before _ I can have the surgery. I have appointments to go to. I have eye exams I have to take. I have to get a complete physical.

Except, funny thing …ha ha fricking ha . . . I find myself missing appointments.

Now, I’m pretty anal about appointments. I always have them in my calendar. I get to ‘em early. Hell. Sometimes I’ve been known to bring a gift. Say, a bottle of wine. Or a three bean salad. Or my famous guacamole, kumquat, and calamari cordon blue casserole (with green chilies). It’s known far and wide. Always take it to potlucks. Makes me a great favorite will all the folks down at the emergency room. I understand they’re naming a stomach pump after me.

Where was I? Oh, yes. But, now, for the first time in my life, I find myself forgetting appointments. Time, and time, AND time again…the various offices of the various eye doctors with whom I’m dealing call me up and say something like, “You do know you were supposed to be in here at nine, don’t you?” And I’d say something like Oh God-Delete It To Halliburton in a Farping Station Wagon and either go dashing off to get to the office or, more likely, have to reschedule.

You don’t think . . . maybe . . . just perhaps . . . could it be? . . . there’s just a tad of avoidance going on here, would ya?

Naw. Course not. Couldn’t be. Could it?

*


But, mind you, there are complications to this. My surgery is scheduled for 15 December. I have had to fight, and squirm, and struggle to get an appointment that early. If I don’t make it on that date, then . . . I have to sweat it out for another couple of months. Which I’m not really happy about doing.

So, I buckle down and try to really, Really, REALLY make every appointment and meeting.

The kicker? It’s just about this time I start picking up static from everyone else involved.

For example, the way I found I had cataracts? Well, way, way back I’d gone in to my ophthalmologist for an eye exam. I wanted to get contact lenses. After my doc had mentioned that I had to have my eyes gouged out … er, that I needed cataract surgery…she had duly ordered the lenses for me.

Cool. So, of course, it takes a while for them to come in. But, they show up on a Tuesday. I pick ‘em up, take ‘em home, and put ‘em in that evening.

Now, the next day, Wednesday, I’m scheduled for a very early appointment (like 9 am) at another doctor’s to have the length of my eyeball measured. They shine this little laser thing into your head. Great fun. Kinda like playing The Target in a good game of Starship Enterprise. Phasers on kill, Mr. Sulu.

But, that morning, I show up, with my brand spandy new contacts in my eyes, and the technician says… says … says “uh-uh.”

“Uh-uh?” I say, curious.

“Nope,” she adds.

“Nope?” I remark.

“No can do. No way. No how. Outta the pool. Game over.”

“Come again?”

“You’re screwed.”

It turns out when you wear contact lenses, your eyes adjust to them by minutely changing shape. That means the eye may not be the same length, or whatever, when the surgeon whips out the old chain saw and heads for your socket.

“But I’ve only worn ‘em for five hours,” I say.

“Tough toadies,” she responds, compassionately. Or, anyway, words to that effect.

It turns out, in fact, that you’re not supposed to wear your contacts for something like two weeks before they do their pre-operative measurement. My operation is now just about sixteen days away. It is just barely . . . BARELY . . . possible for me to get a new appointment for the necessary exam before the surgery.

At first, the technician doesn’t want to make the appointment but, fortunately, the folks at my regular ophthalmologist’s office are so mortified that they’d forgotten to tell me not to wear the lenses that they pushed a little and we got it all worked out.

Now I had only one last hurtle to …well . . hurtle over before I went for the operation.

But…

It proved to a be a real doozy.


*

I had to get a complete physical from my general practitioner prior to my operation. I made my appointment and saw the guy and he’d given me a clean bill of health. Then, he adds, “You know, this is overkill for your eye surgery, but why don’t you get your cholesterol tested . . . at some point in the near future.”

Okay, I say, and toddle on my way.

Now, notice the wording here. I assume, from what the good doc said, that the cholesterol test is separate from the exam I needed for the eye surgery. I think, in retrospect, that the doctor thought that, too. I think everyone thought that.

Except…my doctor’s staff.


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So, time goes on, and as the date of my operation gets closer and closer, I start getting phone calls from the office of the surgeon. It seems that my regular doctor … my GP … had not faxed the results of my physical to him. Without those results, no surgery was possible.

Therefore, I start leaving messages at the office of my GP. Each time I phone, a staff member tells me, “Oh, yes,” we’ll take care of that.”

Except, then I’d get another message from my the eye surgeon saying that it hadn’t happened.

Finally, on the morning of the Friday before my surgery —that is, on 12 December, when my operation is scheduled for 15 December—I end up going to the GP’s office. I go to the desk and say to the nice lady there, “Can I get a copy of the results of my physical so that I can fax them to my eye surgeon?” Because I am in real need, here, I am at my absolute politest. I mean, I’m so damn polite that butter freezes in the old set of choppers. I’m so polite that Miss Manners would be freaking out.

And then . . .

And then . . .

One of the intake nurses comes out and starts yelling at me.

As God is my witness.


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I don’t mean she’s talking loud. I don’t mean she raises her voice.

I mean Yelling.

I mean really Yelling.

I mean yelling at me in front of a lobby full of other patients.

All of whom are looking at me like I gotta be Jack the Ripper.


*

Finally, I get the story. It seems that she is peeved at me because I haven’t had the cholesterol test…which is What The Doctor ORDERED.

Further, she will not allow my records to be sent to the surgeon because I haven’t done What The Doctor ORDERED.

And, lastly, if I have any objections, I can go kiss …

Well, you can guess what she suggests I can go kiss.

I ask to see the Doctor. “He’s busy.” I explain that I’m going in for surgery on Monday. She suggests I go suck an egg. I say that the doctor had said I didn’t need the cholesterol test for the surgery. She suggests something I can do with the egg after I’ve sucked it.

Finally, she agrees that if I go, right then, to the lab downstairs, and have them draw blood, and if the lab can get the results today… “which they probably can’t”… then, maybe, she’ll let the office staff fax the results to the surgeon. That is, if she remembers. And they aren’t busy with “something important.”

Now, let’s walk through what’s going on here. This test requires that you fast for a least ten hours before you take it. Otherwise, the results are meaningless. I haven’t fasted. So, my taking the test is a complete waste of time for everyone concerned. Further, the doctor, to the best of my knowledge, has not actually specified that I take the test before I have the surgery. So, even if the test results did mean anything, nobody needed them before the Monday of my surgery.

So, what is all this about?

The answer, of course, is power. What is happening is that the intake nurse . . . I guess she’s actually a physician’s assistant rather than an RN . . . is demonstrating to me that she, not I, controls the situation. She is demonstrating her power and relishing every second of it. Moreover, she is doing so in front of the other patients, just in case they get any ideas…

It is about then that I recall a line from one of Raymond Chandler’s detective novels. “Put a monkey in a uniform,” his character says, “and it will try to give someone orders.”

Never in my life have I seen that principle so completely in operation.

(And, yes, soon after this, I find a new doctor.)


*

Well, to make a long story long, I finally got all the tests done, all the appointments taken care of, all the results faxed to the right people.

So it is, then, that the morning of the fifteenth arrives.

And I awaken from an uneasy sleep…

Shaking like a leaf.

But that’s for next time.

Onward and upward.


mjt

















Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker