Artificial Tears

At the last minute, they are able to change my wound care appointment to early Friday morning so I can squeeze it in before my visit to the retina specialist, after which I intend to speed on down to work a half day. It's going to be hectic. 

Thursday night I receive a message saying my dear friend Teddy died Tuesday night of a heart attack. My own heart feels like it’s breaking at the news. It had been over a month since we’d talked, and I had meant to call him over the weekend. Sunday night someone had left an anonymous message on my latest blog entry:

If pain and suffering had a sense of humor, it’s laughing. Sean, thanks for giving me courage and confidence to face the unknown with flare and deep glares, as all great artists do.

It was obviously Teddy. But... face the unknown? I was told he had a heart attack, but did he actually kill himself, like he often said he would? Or did he just have a premonition that he was going to die in a few days? Ted had been saying he was going to die since I met him twenty-five years ago. He was always juggling a number of ailments, and had suffered one heart attack already, as well as a stroke. He ate like shit and smoked steadily his whole life so it was a wonder he made it this far, really, though it doesn’t make his death hurt any less. 

I email work to say I won’t be in at all on Friday. My boss tells me he’s sending healing energy my way. 

The next morning I get to the clinic as it opens, and am happy to see that Jenny is my nurse. We chat the entire time about our cats and the recent presidential debate. I tell her about losing my friend and she’s as kind and compassionate as ever. I ask her how KC is and she says still not dating anyone. I feel my stupid heart flutter for a moment, stupidly.

Jenny takes off the cast and says the wound looks really good. So does the one on the right foot. She measures them and takes pictures then leaves for the day; she has a doctor appointment herself. Dr. Beaumont comes in, followed by a godlike warrior of a man. “This is Dr. Thompson,” she says. She looks at the wounds and does a bit of scraping at the callouses, explaining to the other doctor what she’s doing. "A callous is like having a rock in your shoe," she says. He watches without a word. 

“These are both coming along beautifully,” she tells me. I ask her what the next step is, if I should schedule surgery. “Well we might not need to,” she says. I’m confused. 

“I’m confused,” I tell her. “I thought it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to lose it.”

She seems confused about my confusion. “I said you had three choices,” she says. “You can go back in the chamber for forty days. Or you can have it removed. Or you can stay off it as much as possible and see if it heals up. Which it seems to be doing.”

"I didn't realize there was a third choice," I say. “Isn’t the bone infected?” 

“It may or may not be,” she says. 

“What about the MRI?”

“The MRI isn’t conclusive.” 

“But what about the wheelchair?”

“Didn't your primary set you up with one when you saw him?” I tell her that my session with him had basically been a psyche evaluation and that he hadn’t mentioned any wheelchair. 

“Well, I talked to him about it,” she grumbles. “Look, I’m not going to say you have to be in one. It’s up to you to decide. It will speed things along. But the way things are going…what you’re doing seems to be working.” 

My head is spinning. I know I should be relieved and happy, but I’m just bewildered. 

Jenny has left for the day, so Shelley comes in to reapply my soft cast. She chatters on about her kids as I sit there staring at the curtain printed with words like Hope, Love, Gratitude. I want to rip that curtain off its fucking rings. 

I catch the bus with a minute to spare, and head across town to my retina appointment. I wait for a while then get called by a young man with a thick Russian accent. He is awkward and angular and I feel bad but I have to ask him to repeat every other sentence. He says "You're doing great" over and over, like it's a recording. He checks my eyes then dilates my pupils and takes me into another room to do another retina scan, just like last week. 

After the scan he leads me to a cramped waiting room apart from the main one. It’s crowded with patients and their spouses. We all sit there a long time. Occasionally is one of us summoned and the rest of us watch in envy. 

Finally a different assistant calls my name. When we get to the room, there are already people in there. “I thought you were done,” the assistant says, and sends me back to the waiting room. I try to read a magazine but can’t concentrate. I send texts to a few friends about Teddy. I don't know who knows yet; he had gotten more and more isolated over the years and I was one of the few people left who kept in touch with him.

Finally the assistant comes for me again. She sits me down and says she’s going to inject me with red dye to take pictures of my capillaries. “Your vision will be pink for a while afterwards. Let me know if you feel nauseous and we'll stop,” she says. I rest my chin in a little frame and she shoots an intense flashing light into first one eye, then the other, then back, over and over again, for five full minutes. I wonder if they torture prisoners this way. Afterwards, it’s back to the waiting area, which has been freshly painted pink. 

After another half hour I’m finally led down yet another hallway to yet another tiny room where after yet another wait the retina doctor meets me. This plaze is like a labyrinth.

Dr. Wong surprises me by not being Asian. He asks me about the laser surgery I had done years ago and where I had it. I tell him Allentown, and he says he went to college in Philly and that his wife was from Allentown. He tells me her name, as if I'm supposed to know her. 

He says he could do laser surgery again but would prefer not to, because the damage is right in the center of the eye and it’s much riskier. He says there’s medicine that is much safer and just as effective. “We inject it directly into the eye once a month for a while, then we taper off." I ask if I will have to have these shots for the rest of my life and he says probably. I feel like I am going to be sick to my stomach. He says that after the first injection, I'll be able to go ahead with scheduling my cataract surgery.

I tell him that sounds like my best option.

“Great,” he says. “I’ll have the nurse give you the numbing drops.”

“Right now?” I ask. 

“You bet," he says. “Look, if you wait, you’ll be up all night worrying about it. This will take  ten seconds and won’t hurt a bit. I perform forty or fifty of these a day. But it’s totally up to you.”

I’m getting tired of having to make all these choices. I just want someone to tell me what to do.

“Let’s do it,” I sigh. He looks delighted and says he'll send the nurse in. 

The nurse sits down and reads off a list of things I should look out for and be concerned about –the biggest risk is infection- then has me sign a release form. She says if I have any discomfort, I should use artificial tears. I try to come up with a joke about preffering the real thing but my mind isn't working. She puts a lot of numbing drops in my eye and leaves the room as I dab the excess with a tissue. 

Teddy will laugh his ass off at this, I think, forgetting for a moment. 

Dr. Wong returns and puts more numbing drops in and says, “Now to let that simmer for a while.” He’s gone a long time and I start wondering how long the drops will keep my eye numb. I've been in this place three hours already; it's good I called off work. 

When he finally returns he puts more drops in my eye. 

“Does that burn?” he asks. I say no. All I can see hovering above me is the tip of the eyedropper. “Does that burn?” he asks again. I say no. “Okay we’re done,” he says. It wasn’t the eyedropper at all; it was the tip of the needle. It had taken less than ten seconds. I hadn’t felt a thing. 

for Teddy, without whose encouragement I wouldn't be writing