The scheduler surprises me by calling me at work on Martin Luther King Day to confirm my cataract surgery for Thursday. She says the clinic will call me with details, and, again to my surprise, fifteen minutes later they do.
You can’t eat or drink anything the day of surgery, so by the time the Widder comes to pick me up at noon on Thursday, I’m famished; and deprived of coffee, my thinking is as fuzzy as the vision in my left eye. I also strained my back the day before, and if I twist in a particular way I feel like I might pass out.
We are very early. I sign the consent forms and take a seat. The Widder abandons me to find a Starbucks. There are four elderly couples waiting already, chatting amongst themselves. How nice it must be to not have to go through things alone.
There is something bittersweet about losing this lens I’ve used my whole life. I think of the vanished friends whose images were once reflected upside down upon its surface. Will it be harder for me to picture them with a new eye that has never seen them? I know that’s not how it works, but it still unsettles me.
I look around with it for the last time. The waiting room is long and narrow and the carpet and walls and furniture are gray. The only color is provided by two gargantuan monstera plants in the corner. Trucks thunder past and through the glass doors I can see an AutoZone and a 7-11. This is a truly bleak corner of the city.
Then the door opens and if this was a movie, the music would come to a halt with a needle scratch. A goddess stands there, blocking my view of the 7-11. All the couples stop talking. She strides in slow-motion up to the reception window in a pair of boots that seem to make the earth shudder beneath their soles. Her ebony hair is long and flowing. Her pants are supernaturally tight. Her blouse and lipstick are the color of blood dripping from a saber toothed tiger’s jaws. She says something in a thick Hispanic accent to the receptionist, then walks over and sits directly across from and crosses her legs. I catch a faint whiff of perfume; tasteful yet intoxicating. She’s not wearing a wedding ring.
Thankfully, a few minutes later they call my name and I somehow mount my scooter without falling on my face. I turn around in the narrow space, coming dangerously close to brushing against one of Aphrodite’s shitkickers. She doesn’t look up from her phone.
The assistant is the same one I had last time. She leads me into a tiny room and has me sit in a huge chair that takes up most of the space. There is barely enough room for her and I and my scooter. Just like last time, there is music playing when she’s there, and just like last time it shuts off the moment she leaves the room. The song this time is Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely, and she is. Her skin is brown but her hair is thick and blonde beneath her blue hairnet. She hands me a hairnet of my own from a box on the wall labeled Disposable Bouffant Covers.
She asks me which eye I’m having done and I tell her the left and she tells me to point to it and draws a dot above it with a marker. They always do this when I get my foot worked on as well. Every nurse has tales of the catastrophes that occurred because a doctor operated on, or cut off, the wrong appendage.
On the wall is a black and white photo of a calla lily so vaginal it would make Georgia o Keefe blush. Luckily the nurse who comes in next is very plain looking. She even has a couple of warts. She asks all the same questions and starts the series of drops. “We want you numb like gum, as they say,” she tells me. I’m not sure who says that, but within minutes my eye feels like it’s coated with rubber cement.
She inserts an IV line in my hand and apologizes for her cold fingers; I can feel how icy they are even through her gloves. She says it’s due to a neurological disorder. She checks my blood sugar and asks me how old I was when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I tell her fourteen and she says that’s how old her kid is. He’s had Crohn’s disease for five years. “I had gestational diabetes when I was pregnant,” she says. “I kept a pretty strict keto diet but the one thing I got cravings for were strawberry milkshakes from Burgerville. I was pretty sure I was going to give birth to a strawberry milkshake.”
She leaves and the anesthesiologist appears. She is very attractive. She asks me how I did with the anesthetic last time. I tell her it was great, and ask if she can send me home with some. “We don’t want you feeling too good, we just need you pliable,” she says. She talks about the time she had to use a scooter like mine. “It wasn’t fun but when I was done I fixed the brakes and sold it for what I paid for it.” She doesn’t close the door after her, and across the hall I see a pale, delicate young woman who looks like Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring, only wearing a blue bouffant cover.
The doctor pops in to say hi. I never noticed how young and attractive she is. Soon after that, two more cute young women arrive to escort me to the operating room. One of them has glittery pink shoes and I compliment her on them and both women start giggling and babbling on how much they love them as they lead me into the operating room.
Once inside I hop off my scooter and someone takes it away. I lie down on the bed and the doctor tells me to scootch up, then up some more, then down a bit, then up again, then to the right. “No, right,” she says. A woman wipes my face with disinfectant and the anesthesiologist takes my hand. The doctor tapes my forehead back and pries open my eyelid and adds more drops.
I feel less stoned this time; I probably shouldn’t have made that comment about how much I enjoyed the drugs. I notice the whir of the machine, which I hadn’t before. Last time the colored lights seemed tactile, like globs of paint, but now they look watery and translucent, spinning around each other like spotlights.
The doctor keeps ordering me to look down at a single white light that pierces through the colors. I keep trying but it’s very uncomfortable to do so. She sounds impatient. While last time I felt almost nothing, now I feel a lot of poking and prodding as well as bursts of pressure and a sudden splash of water. It’s not painful but it’s far from pleasant.
When it’s over they bring my scooter and I carefully wheel into the next room to recover. A clear plastic sieve covers my right eye. Sorry, left eye. Good thing they made that mark.
The nurse with the cold fingers asks if I want a drink and I gulp down two cups of water. We talk about the nurses’ strike. She says she has a lot of friends who are involved with it. She says they all hate that they have to strike but are enjoying the camaraderie of the picket line. She says a bunch of them are single moms who are working for DoorDash to pay the bills.
The doctor pokes her head in and says everything went great, then runs off. The assistant with her own soundtrack comes in to say she’ll see me when I come in to get the third eye done. I tell her I think that’s a different kind of doctor.
The Widder is waiting for me in the waiting room. The goddess, of course, is nowhere to be seen, if she ever was there at all.
The sun is blinding even with the sunglasses. On the way home I feel so nauseous I close my eyes and have to breathe heavily to keep from throwing up.
Just like last time, I topple into bed like a corpse. Olivia creeps under the covers beside me, and when I wake up she’s still there, chirping irritably when I sit up. I carefully peel off the eye shield and blink. Everything’s still blurry from all the damn drops, but it’s already easier to see. I look out at the hills, darkening with dusk, and the tints in both eyes look similar. Even with the blur, I can tell that they’re no longer fighting for dominance.
I’m not really hungry, despite not having eaten all day, but I really want coffee. I roll down to the coffee shop, where two beautiful women wait behind the counter. “Can I have a name for the order?” one of them asks. “I’m sorry, I know I should know it by now.” I tell the other barista I like her Dead Moon t-shirt and she mutters thanks. A group of equally attractive women have pushed a bunch of tables together and are holding some sort of meeting. I try not to leer but I find myself sneaking glances like the lonely old pervert I am. I’ve been blind so long I’ve forgotten that the gift of sight can also be a curse.
