Looking Down
My son walks into our house after a class and yells out, “Hey Papà, I’m back. How’s it going?” He comes into my room. Without missing a beat he says: “Oh, looking down.”
It’s the best joke I’ve heard all week. Because it’s been a week without many, and because it’s true: I am, literally, looking down. I’ve been this way for a few days, head hanging over the end of a coach, forehead resting on a pillow on top of a twelve-pack of paper towels, staring down at the floor.
I have a detached retina, with what we eventually discovered is five different tears in it.
In between sessions with a laser, my assignment is to keep my head facing down for 50 minutes of every hour. With my remaining eye of vision, I can read. I can watch videos. I can type (see, look! apologies for tyypos). But my head is down.
Looking down is humbling. And REALLY boring. But I can still look.
For the three weeks prior to this, I’d been ignoring an annoying problem in my right eye, first some brown floating spots that looked like gnats, then a slowly emerging shadow on the inside corner of the eye that looked like a tiny piece of lint.
When I finally went in to an optometrist to get it checked out, things escalated quickly. He sent me immediately to a retina specialist who gave me the official diagnosis. The doc there was ticked off I had waited so long and told me if I’d waited another week I would have permanently lost my vision in the eye. He scheduled surgery for the next day.
So here’s the PSA version of this post:
You may have a detached retina if you:
· See new, unexpected “floaters” in your eye, especially if they are large and circular (I had these, though they were not large or circular)
· Have a sensation of flashing lights
· Have gradually reduced peripheral vision or newly blurred vision
· Experience a shadow or dark curtain in your vision (I had this)
· Have had a recent serious fall (I had recent falls off of a surfboard and one on the tennis court; not clear if these triggered the detachment; in many cases it just happens to people over 60)
· Notice your pupil’s not responding normally to changes in light
When in doubt, get your eyes checked.
Source: Mayo Clinic
Left untreated, a retinal detachment moves across the eye like a lunar eclipse (Image from space.com)
After getting a gas bubble in the eye one day (to stabilize things), then three rounds of laser beams into the eyeball over the past week (to reattach the retina and heal the tears), I am apparently out of the crisis phase of this particular health event. But it’s hard not to be reminded of how simultaneously remarkable, resilient and vulnerable our bodies are. Here are a few random thoughts I’ve been mulling over this week with my unexpected (and breathtakingly boring) free time:
Planned obsolescence isn’t just for Chevy’s: The older you get, the less often physicians try to explain a health problem. More and more when something breaks down, doctors just tell me, “Yeah, well, these things just happen as you get older.” Or “Yeah, you may just need to learn to live with that.” In this case, they are definitely fixing my problem, but don’t seem much concerned about what caused the detachment: “Sometimes this just happens to people over 60.” I want reasons; I get shrugs.
Thank God for… oh, never mind: Whenever I face a health challenge, I find myself saying, “If I can just get through this ______, I’ll never take _______ for granted again.” And then I get better and I forget again. Maybe this time I’ll be different if I make it through – oh, who am I kidding?
Breaking down is hard to do: There hasn’t been much I can do to be useful to friends or family during this time. My wife has been schlepping me to appointments, cooking, cleaning, laundering while I’ve been…. looking down; being a patient. It’s hard to get used to the fact that my sole contribution to the family is just… trying to get better.
The stakes are getting lower, or at least different: When things were looking most bleak this week, I found myself saying, “I could probably get through the rest of my life with one eye.” It wasn’t hard to get there. That would have been much harder to reconcile myself to when I was 30, or even 50. But this is not going to be the last part of my physical bag of tricks to fail, so it is good to go through the thought exercise and realize: What actually matters in life is our ability to be generous and kind. Vision? Optional.
That doesn’t mean this doesn’t suck. Taking a laser beam to eye is threatening to bump colonoscopy and dental surgery as my least favorite medical activities.
On the plus side I’m picking up some new skills; I’ve become excellent at drinking through a straw upside down. My left eye is operating at max efficiency. And my posts are getting shorter.
Take care of your health.
-Leslie
Notes:
Medical description of detached retina: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/retinal-detachment/symptoms-causes/syc-20351344