Balloon

     I’m very nervous before my appointment at the eye clinic, though I don’t have any reason to be. I’m just meeting with the scheduler so I can sign the consent forms for my cataract surgery three weeks from now. I guess I’m afraid that another obstacle will leap up in my path. After all I’ve been through, especially with this goddamn office, it’s not an irrational fear. 

    I wait in line and get called up to the counter by one of the receptionists, but an old man starts yelling at her from across the room and cuts in front of me. I go to the next person, who is the same vacuous simp I’ve had every visit here. I give him my name and he stares at his screen a long time before asking who I’m here to see. I can’t remember the scheduler’s name. He asks my date of birth and stares some more, types a bit, stares. 

    “Your appointment was canceled,” he finally says, remarkably matter-of-factly for someone who only has moments to live. 

    I take a deep breath and touch the charm around my neck for strength. 

    “No one told me,” I say very, very calmly. 

    He types some more, and his eyes show a flicker of alarm.

    “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll come get you,” he says. I thank him and weave between the patients standing in the middle of every aisle, staring like fish at their phones. 

    A few minutes later the receptionist comes over and says the scheduler can make time for me, if I don’t mind waiting fifteen or twenty minutes. I thank him very, very poilitely. 

    An assistant I’ve never seen before –they must have a massive staff here- leads me to a tiny exam room and tells me to rest my chin on a machine I’ve also never seen before. It’s disk-shaped, with a rectangular window in the middle. She aims the window at my eyeball and a blight blue bar with a red dot in the middle blinds me. “Blink,” she says. “Blink. Now hold. Good. Now blink.”

    Next she has me rest my chin on an adjacent machine, again one I’ve never seen. I think of asking what these things are for but I realize I don’t actually care. I look into an eyepiece, in which is a fuzzy picture. “It’s okay if it looks fuzzy,” she says. She turns a knob and the image sharpens into a desert road with a hot air balloon resting on the horizon. For some reason I find it unsettling.

    She swivels the eyepiece toward my other eye then whisks me away to a familiar room, the one with the machine with the horrible strobe. Thankfully she seats me at a different machine with a benign blip of illumination inside. I finally ask her what this one is for and she says it’s to measure the length of my eye so they know what size lens I need. 

    She prints off a bunch of things and then a very thin, very pale young woman in a long black dress with black stockings teeters in and says that she’s the scheduler. She is completely unlike the person I pictured. She looks like she’s going to a Victorian funeral.

    She thrusts a packet of paper at me listing all the things that can go wrong but almost never do with this surgery, including infections and loss of the eye and even, extremely rarely, death. She tells me to read it if I am able to, then helps me fill out a form indicating which eye and which kind of lens I want. I choose the right eye and the lens that will allow me to be farsighted, which I haven’t been since I was seven. I will only need glasses to read, provided those things that almost never go wrong continue to not go wrong.

    I ask what I’m supposed to do between surgeries, since I will only have one clear-seeing eye. “Sometimes they punch out one of the lenses of your glasses,” she says. I don’t bring up monocles or eye patches, even though I really want to. Instead I just sign the consent form, and she hands me a folder with instructions for what to do before and after surgery. 

    The whole visit I haven’t cracked a single joke, haven’t made any of my usual attempts to cover my anxiety with folksy banter. This place is like the opposite of the wound care clinic. No one here has a sense of humor except the guy who jabs me in the eye with a needle once a month.  

    “Call if you have any questions,” the scheduler says, her voice flat, her face a chalk island in a sea of dark curls. I thank her with strained cheeriness. The moment I leave I forget her name.