Tumbling E

The ophthalmologist’s assistant has long fake lashes. She gives me a form to fill out then checks my eyes but the only letter I can read is the big E. I try to engage her in small talk but she’s not interested. She puts drops in my eyes and hands me a tablet and leaves the room. The tablet talks to me in the doctor’s voice to educate me in the basics of cataract surgery. I know most of the information already; I’ve had a number of friends go through it this year. Everyone tells me it’s a weird but painless experience. “You may see flashing lights and colors,” the doctor’s voice says. I’m nervous but impatient to get it over with; the world has been a blur for six months now. Though I detest eye exams, I've actually been looking forward to this appointment, seeing it as a step toward normalcy.

The doctor comes in with a different assistant. She shines a light into my eyes from various angles, telling me over and over to look at her ear. She gives me more drops and has me sit back in the chair while she shines another light into my eyes, telling me to look in every direction. Upper left. Left. Lower left. Look at your feet. It’s extremely uncomfortable and seems to go on for a long time. The doctor seems irritated but I may just be paranoid.

When she’s done, the assistant with the lashes returns and leads me into a tiny room where she does a retina scan. I rest my chin on a frame and stare into an eyepiece at a brilliant blue orb. A red line sweeps the orb from top to bottom and then we do the same with the other eye. It looks like a graphic from a space movie from the eighties. She leads me back into the first room to wait. The doctor pops her head in and asks if I mind if she sees another patient first. I have seven hours before my MRI so I tell her to take her time.

While I sit there, I look up why they always use a big E instead of some other letter. The most common eye chart was developed by the Dutch scientist Herman Snellen in 1862. The E’s horizontal bars help show if people can tell black from white. He also made what is known as the Tumbling E, for children who can’t read. The E is shown in various positions and the child tells the doctor which direction it faces. 

I have a sudden memory of one of these charts. I had an eye exam when I was young and was given a wooden E to hold in the position of the each one the doctor pointed to. I can picture the room where the exam is being held in; it’s in the basement of my elementary school. I remember being fascinated by the eye chart; I can see it clearly in my mind. I find this memory suspect, however; did they really do eye exams right there in the school? All I know for sure is, I was seven when I got my first pair of glasses. 

The doctor returns with printouts of my retina scans. She shows me the left eye, which looks fine, and then the right, which has a bulge on the retina due to diabetes. “I need you to see a retina specialist before we go ahead with the surgery,” she says. I feel my stomach drop. Is nothing in my life ever easy and straightforward?

“What will they do about it?” I ask.

“They’ll either do laser surgery, similar to what you had years ago, or they may just give you medication to make the swelling go down.”

I had wanted to ask if she’s ever seen the film Gray’s Anatomy, in which Spalding Gray describes his attempts to cope with his eye issues –the way he says the words “macular pucker” makes me chortle- but she brusquely says goodbye, so I just wheel out to the front desk and make an appointment for next week. The sunlight is hard on my dilated pupils and I can barely see. The world at the edges of my vision crackles and disintegrates. 

I stop at Safeway for a few things; the other grocery stores are on strike. The only lines open are self-checkout lines. The machine doesn’t give me the sale price on my cheese and I tell the attendant and he charges me the wrong price. I’m too tired to argue so I just mentally add the six bucks to all the other money that wretched store owes me. 

I take the streetcar home and eat lunch. I try to do some work online but my internet connection has been so spotty lately that I can only work in seven minutes bursts before I get booted off. 

A few hours later it’s time to head across town for my MRI. I almost miss my transfer because the first bus driver misses a turn, and instead of just circling back, he has to call dispatch so they can reroute him through his GPS. On the second bus, the driver gets in a fight with a woman who accidentally told him she needed Stark Street instead of Sandy. She apologizes but he is furious with her for some reason; maybe they’d had some conflict before I got on. 

I get to the hospital and check in at the desk and head down to the bowels of the building, where they do all the diagnostic imaging. 

I fill out a three page form and wait for twenty minutes until they’re ready for me. The tech asks if there’s any metal in my body I forgot to mention on the form. There is potentially metal in my body but I didn’t mention it on purpose. The mysterious foreign object in my foot didn’t disrupt the last MRI I had six months ago, so I figure it’s probably fine. 

The tech is a bald older man who, like everyone I’m encountering today, turns out to be impervious to my attempts to engage him in friendly conversation. He tells me not to move my foot and I tell him that the last time my foot twitched despite my best efforts to relax. He slides me into the machine and it starts banging and screeching. Ten minutes later he pulls me out and says my foot twitched. He wedges some padding around my foot and slides me back in, obviously irritated. 

When I get out, the sun is going down. This was my favorite time of day before my eye problems; now, the dusk is hellish, filled with indistinct forms and shadowy figures. The sidewalk is covered with invisible obstacles, and I roll slowly across it so as not to overturn my scooter. Two men are sitting in the bus stop smoking fentanyl. 

On the way home I get a text from the eye specialist, asking me to leave a review. I delete the text and sit with my head in my hands. I have two back to back doctor appointments tomorrow morning. I feel like I am in free fall, my broken body tumbling through space, too tired to scream, praying that solid ground arrives soon.