KILLER HOBBIES

Eyesight is something you don’t think much about until threatened with its loss. I don’t mean the fading into nearsightedness that happens with age, I mean blindness.

I’ve known I have glaucoma for many months. I’ve used my eyedrops and gone to have my pressure measured at regular intervals, but while my eye doctor fussed about not getting the pressure down to low normal – at high normal there were still signs of the disease progressing – I wasn’t too worried. It didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t see any difference in my vision.

But he could see a difference in the back of my eyes and at last he sent me to an eye surgeon for an opinion. And the opinion was, I needed surgery. The operation, I was told, was simple: a tiny slit would be cut in the eyeball, and treated so it wouldn’t close with scar tissue. Fluid would slowly seep from the permanent wound, bringing the pressure down. Piece of cake.
Well, not exactly.

I was expecting it to be an office procedure, since it was same-day surgery and didn’t call for cutting into my skull or my torso. But no, I went to a clinic with that, in the back rooms, resembled a regular hospital. I wasn’t undressed, but was invited to lie down on a gurney, covered with a blanket, and hooked to an IV, a blood pressure cuff, a heart monitor, and given oxygen through two little prongs in my nose. What is it about a heart monitor that makes some people nervous? I spent several minutes trying to calm myself and knock off the ten extra beats per minute it roused in me. No luck.

A good-looking young man in surgical scrubs introduced himself as my anesthesiologist. I couldn’t invent him for a book, unless it was a broad comedy. He spoke in a slow, soft, gentle voice, as if he’d been using the tools of his trade on himself. I almost laughed out loud at him. I was thinking Valium – and indeed that was used for this procedure. But first he needed to knock me out briefly while he did something unpleasant involving a needle and my eye. Sure enough, I was gone briefly, and when I came back I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I was assured in a gentle voice that this was all right, and wheeled off to an operating theater. A white translucent cloth was put over my face. Normally I cannot abide a cover on my face, it makes me feel as if I’m suffocating, but between the Valium and the oxygen, I felt just fine.

The surgeon and his nurse talked about very mundane things that I can’t quite remember – I think one of them was a vacation one of them was planning – while he worked. I felt nothing at all, not even pressure, until the end, when a cool liquid was poured over the eye and a bandage was applied. The eye is tender, and I have to wear a guard over it at night to prevent myself from accidentally rubbing it – it goes on these little spasms of intense itching and I am under no circumstances to poke at it. It is intensely red but not bruised and I hope it heals without incident. I have eyedrops to use four times a day and I’m to pay attention to any sharp pains that may develop.

After all this, I am now taking my vision seriously. If this is required to save my vision, then something important and scary is going on inside my eye. My paternal grandmother lost her eyesight as a child, and I have a very dear friend who is blind. But I don’t think I ever seriously considered what it might be like to be blind myself. Not until now anyway. Now I’m grateful I live in a time and place where glaucoma is not a sentence to a life lived in darkness. Because, you see, I have glaucoma in both eyes. On April 2, the other one goes under the knife.