If I've got the facts right, I was born extremely farsighted, with amblyopia in the left eye. According to the National Eye Institute, amblyopia is a breakdown in how the eye and brain work together, meaning the brain doesn't fully recognize the input from one eye, causing it to rely more on the stronger eye, and letting the weak eye, just sort of coast. The journalism division of my brain uses my left eye for background, maybe. But it's not a trusted source. There was an astigmatism in the left eye as well. According to the Mayo clinic's website, an astigmatism is an "imperfection in the curvature of the eye that causes blurred vision." It strikes me as kind of funny how vague I am on the details, but I guess, what is water to this little fish?
They're pretty green eyes with dark blue rings around the irises. They just didn't work that well. Especially the left one.
Despite what my parents recall as a horrifyingly incompetent and off-putting first eye doctor, who, through the fug of cigarette smoke in his exam room, wheezed at them to abandon all hope for my vision, I had a pretty successful course of treatment. Since my father had overcome a similar eyeball situation in his own youth, he was delighted to completely ignore the guy, and find doctors who actually knew what they were doing. So, I got glasses when I was two or three, wore an eyepatch as directed by Dr. Rice, my wonderful Optometrist at Emerson Hospital, got soft contacts at twelve, and... wore 'em. They were great. Cleaned 'em in a bubbly fizzy cup at night; quick saline rinse; I could see fine and I got to adolesce without nerdy glasses in junior high and high school. And at ballet, where all that spotting would whip a tortoiseshell frame right off a kid.
I still had glasses as a backup, nighttime reading, etc. Trusty old things. And for many years, I guess almost 20, when I was going to a play - or a movie, but most importantly to me, a play - I would wear my glasses instead of my contacts, just so I could take them off and use my super-power of farsightedness to actually see the actors' faces. It was wonderful. Tiny, subtle facial expressions in a spotlight. In a crafted, collaborative moment of trying to capture and share the human condition. Sigh.
The Event that happened to change all that was LASIK. There are people, or at least meme-creators, who say you should never regret anything you've done, because there was a lesson you had to learn...or something. Respectfully, I disagree in at least this case. I regret having done this.
Here's what happened. I went to two recommended surgeons in Los Angeles. They both said no. I was too high-risk, first because of the strength of my prescription (around a +6), and second, because farsightedness is far more difficult to fix than the much more common nearsightedness. (Nearsighted eyeballs are long and skinny, so "shaving them down" is a piece of cake. Farsighted eyeballs are short and fat, so you have to, sort of.... pinch them in and up. With lasers.) The astigmatism in my left eye was a bonus hurdle. But I was determined because - ohmygod - my boyfriend at the time, Sharp-Eyed Matt, wanted us to backpack through South America for a year, and he really foresaw the inconvenience of the bubbly fizzy cup and saline rinse. I can't blame him, much as I'd like to. I look back in horror at myself for risking something as precious as my eyesight, MY EYESIGHT, so as not to impede a backpacking lifestyle that I, in no way, wanted to adopt. My god. I was born with a backbone. With bravado to spare! I made all the neighborhood kids put on Really Rosie in my backyard, but I sang all the parts from behind the big tree. (I mean, I also played Rosie, of course, in front of the tree.) But can you really trust the neighbor kids to do it properly? Anyway, where did THAT kid go? My parents are both incredibly smart. And sensible. And supportive. And... appropriately wary and cautious with big decisions. How could adolescence and internalized fairy tales have reduced me to an essential invertebrate willing to do anything a guy wanted? A guy who, if you've been following, Dear Reader, I secretly hated.
(Although I am thoroughly enjoying unjustly excoriating him in these posts! I'm still the bad guy here, it seems. Ah well.)
I persevered. I found a third surgeon at a big LASIK center down in Orange County who said yes. He did caution me that it was possible, maybe even probable, that after the first round of surgery, I'd need a "touch-up" to perfect my vision. I said, "Whatever, let's do this." I drove down to Orange County. Real Job Matt didn't come up from San Diego. Because of a really important work deadline. So I rolled up, having been advised they can give you a Xanax to help you relax, but not to worry, it's really very easy and straightforward. However, on the day, and I forget why, they wouldn't give me a Xanax. (Just for the record, I had never taken one... I've taken them now, though.) So, thrown, I tiptoed into the Bright White Laser Room, and lay down on one of two beds in the large space. They gave me a large grungy stuffed green frog to clutch for comfort. There was another patient on the Bright White Bed across the room.
They numb your eyes, and cut a flap in the outer layer of the cornea, which they then lift up and prop open, presumably "Clockwork Orange" style, while they laser the rest of your cornea into a new shape. The flap plops back down and protects the inner reshaped part of the cornea. More or less. You're awake, but never in pain. If you're lucky, you've had a Xanax. As they do each eye, they put a bunch of pressure on your eyeball so it goes all black & white TV static in your vision, and you can't actually see, except for a point of light you're told to focus on. There's the laser machine itself, which is a loud bulky boxy thing, and a Laser Wrangler, who is possibly The Well-Reviewed Surgeon himself, and at least one nurse, possibly two, who I never saw arrive. They were just suddenly there, after I could no longer see, urging, in worried tones, "LOOK RIGHT AT THE LIGHT! LOOK AT THE LIGHT!"
Now, when there's someone rodeo-ing a bucking laser over your head, you kind of don't want to move a single muscle, even your lips, even just to say, "What do you mean, Look Right At The Light? AM I NOT? Am I doing it wrong? Please tell me if you're just encouraging me to keep doing it right, or if I'm doing it wrong! I don't understand why you sound so worried!!!" But you don't, because if you breathe, move a hair, you're afraid you'll be made blind.
So, there's that fear.
Afterward, I think they shuttled me to a pre-arranged hotel room. They said it's totally normal for everything to be blurry that night, but it'd be a lot better in the morning, and then it'd gradually get better from there, over the weeks or months, but maybe a little longer for me, since I was a such a tough case. My eyes might be a bit dry. My night vision might be a blurry for a while. And that night, I was indeed quite blurry, but not so much that I couldn't look up the poem that suddenly flooded into my mind, Invictus, by William Ernest Henley. I called Busy Matt to tell him I'd survived, and to celebrate our success. To tell him that I was "bloody, but unbowed." He told me he didn't really care for old, grandiose poetry. More of a modern poetry man, himself.
I drove home on the 405 the next day. I couldn't read a thing. I had to stop for gas, and I couldn't read... anything. The meter, the instructions. I guessed, and got gas in the car, and made it home.
For years, if it was dark out, I couldn't read anything at all. Saying "turn left on Centinela" was useless. I needed to know how many stoplights ahead the turn was. (FYI, there's a bank on the corner of Centinela and Venice... money... cents... I've put symbolic signposts on corners throughout Los Angeles to find my way.) Every light had a halo, or a double, sometimes both. One night, I turned the wrong way off the freeway. I ended up in a neighborhood I didn't recognize, but what I could clearly sense was that I was afraid to get out of the car there and ask for directions. I'm ashamed to say I pulled my hoodie up, and just kept driving, making random turns until I found the freeway again. Not a big fan of feeling that helpless.
It gradually got better. I stopped having to use punctal plugs and apply eye drops every hour as my eyes got some level of moisture back over the next many years. These days, fifteen years later, I still can't sense distance well at night, so changing lanes on the freeway takes some white knuckling, but as long as I don't have to read street signs at night, Waze and I make it across town just fine. Some days are shit, where one eye just won't focus at all, and some days I stop in my tracks, amazed that I can suddenly see EVERYTHING. Oh, and when I get just slightly choked up by, like, a cat commercial, there's a tiny amount of tears that, just for a minute, smooths out the surface of my eyes, and for that minute, I can see ... individual leaves on the trees across the street, just one each of letters on a page, my cuticles, the surprising quantity of dust everywhere. This is what makes me hope I'm not actually losing the power of sight, optical-nerve-wise. Just...terrain-wise.
Modern Poetry Matt was dismissed, and I met this gorgeous (if blurry) new guy, Steven, who really deserved someone who could actually see him, he's that gorgeous. I like to think I "see" him in the ways that count. He's great.
About my eyeball terrain. It was immediately clear that the "possible touch-up" was really a required full second surgery, as my vision was much worse after the first one. I was less farsighted (only around a +3 - goodbye, actor-seeing superpower) but my eyes were left like an in-process street repair, with steel plates stuck clumsily to the road with globby strips of asphalt. The re-surfaced cornea was now so bumpy that it, by itself, refracted light. They determined on my check-up visit, that, yup, they only got about halfway through the correction, but... didn't they say?! You can only ever hope to do three degrees of correction per surgery. Didn't they say that? (They had not.) But, oh heck...wouldn't you know it... there wasn't enough cornea tissue left to attempt a second surgery. So... sorry?
What else? Glasses no longer do much, because as nicely as they bend the light as it comes through the lenses...the light still hits my bumpy corneas. Still, I'm grateful for the amount they do help.
I subsequently went to some very expensive specialists, one of whom gave me hard contacts. Now, those worked! They rigidly smooshed my eyeballs into a smooth curve, and I could see every single thing! However, since the surface of my eyes was Triscuit-like, they were excruciating. I suffered through them on occasional special events, only to squirm while I learned the truth about everyone's wrinkles, including my own. Eventually, I let them dry out, and threw them away.
One specialist, Dr. Super (his actual name), seemed like he would be my new Wonderful Optometrist. Maybe it was his South African accent. But one day, he nervously spun an awkward metaphor about how, if my eyesight were like my favorite hobby, running, as time went by... about ten years or so, I'd no longer be... running. I don't know if meant to imply I'd be blind within ten years. My hearing disconnected from my brain as if it were... my left eye.
I fled, and never went back. I found a new eye doctor, and made Steven sit in the exam room with me, in case my brain short-circuited again. New Doctor has never told me I'm going blind. He's just told me I need to wear glasses at all times, because if anything at all happens to my right eye, I'd be, I guess, left with only an unreliable narrator to explain the world. So I wear glasses. All the time. He's also forewarned me I will not pass my next driver's license exam, but that there's a special doctor's-note carve-out for people like me. It's in his file for me, under: To-Do. (After I squeaked through my latest license renewal, he said "They passed you? They shouldn't have." Good times.)
I did investigate legal action at the time. I learned that most lawyers won't take on any medical lawsuit...something about $250,000... Googling that now, I see there was a law on the books capping damages in California for medical malpractice cases at $250,000, and that wasn't enough money for most malpractice lawyers to bother themselves with. Plus, we'd need another doctor to go on record saying it was actual malpractice, and that was hard to get even if, like, a kid died. It was tough terrain for an hourly non-profit fundraiser to navigate solo. Somehow, I backboned them into refunding the surgery cost, and paying for that pair of $1,000 hard contacts. But I had to sign away my right to ever litigate further, if and when I mastered both our healthcare system and our legal system.
I carried on. The blurry new guy became my boyfriend, then much to my delight, my husband. I dreaded going places where I might run into people I knew, because I couldn't tell who they were across a theatre lobby, or the street, or the room. I was mortified to think I might be blanking people, right to their faces. I wonder how many moments I plowed over into the snowbank of that fear. How many missed opportunities to connect with people. Luckily, Steven knows to do a big embarrassing wave if he goes into the movie theatre before me, while I do a precautionary pre-movie pee. Without the Martha Graham, I would never find him.
My friend Kristen and I just shot a video tribute for our friend Natalie's birthday. I know she hates doing things like these, but she loves Natalie so much that if we took it seriously, she'd get all choked up. So I tried to save her with cheesy comedy. I wrote a script. We each had 4 lines, and then we'd say "Happy Birthday, Natalie! We love you!" together, and hopefully it would be all cute and stuff. My lines were setups for her responses. Easy peasy...I'd make it as easy on her as I could.
We got our friend Sal to shoot the video. We were both holding our lines. But when it came to the magical "go time" I confessed I wasn't going to be reading mine. (I mean...it's 4 lines...which I wrote...) But Kristen wasn't thrilled that she'd be reading off the page and I wouldn't. Unbeknownst to us, Sal had already started filming, and here is what strikes me about the pre-roll: I said "I can't read it" three times in the first two seconds.
Now, one time, maybe, to make Kristen not feel bad that she'd be referring to her script. But three times, in immediate succession, while bulldozing over the cute quip Kristen was trying to make?
If I were a person who didn't like me, or didn't know me, I'd think "Ohmygod WE GET IT. YOU CAN'T READ. Geeeeeeeeez! Calm down, lady. You want a PRIZE?"
If I were a person who did like me, I'd think "Oh, sweetie. You seem really anxious. I think you need to address this. I hope there's something that can be done."
If I were just me, I would spend a good half hour afterward trying to trim out the first 1.8 seconds to leave in that cute comment Kristen made, while editing out two of the "I can't read its" but would be unable to do so because... I couldn't read the screen.
Here's where I shouldn't fail to mention that I make my living from reading, ha ha ha. But as I have been learning, much of our reading comprehension is shape recognition. The shape of words. And if we're familiar with the shapes of enough of them, we just scoop up their meaning as we fly on past. So somehow, it is something I can still do.
See, this is why this one is hard. There's no cool epiphany. I haven't discovered some miraculous new eyeball technology that can make it all go away. (Although, I mean, lemme know if such a thing exists.) There are just aloof eyeballs, and choices I wish I hadn't made, and walking right past possible friends on the street. I hope that's as bad as it gets.
