"That can't be good," I thought, and, putting my groceries down, immediately called my sister the optician, who said she thought I should go to a hospital.
Because I was carrying perishables I first went home to drop them off, half-hoping that the black snow would go away. Then from home I called Telehealth, the health information hotline, only to be told that they were so busy fielding calls about COVID-19 that it would be hours before someone would get back to me. Then I went online, of course, because that's we do nowadays, and discovered that the symptoms I had mostly matched having a detached (or detaching) retina. I was putting my coat on to go to emergency when Telehealth phoned me back.
Emergency was almost empty. There were about half a dozen people, a couple of them wearing masks, and occasionally coughing gently. I stayed as far away from them as I could. I was then in fairly quick order given an eye test, a cursory peripheral vision test (as in "how many fingers am I holding up?"), and sent home because I could still see. I had an appointment with the eye clinic for 9 a.m. and instructions to come back immediately if I saw "a dark curtain descending". I said "but I will be sleeping", and the doctor conceded that that could be a problem. She also conceded that there would be nothing they could do for me if I turned up in the middle of the night complaining that the dark curtain had descended. Essentially they would have called in an eye doctor to look at it, who couldn't have done anything about until morning.
To cut to the chase, I had a vitreous detachment which had caused a small retinal tear, and by 2 p.m. or so on Monday found myself reclining in chair in Toronto Western with a harried young doctor shooting laser beams into my eye, a painless but incredibly uncomfortable procedure. The discomfort, aside from the blinding violence of the light, originated in having my eyeball pushed every which way with a sharpish instrument that looked very much like a coffee stir stick. When she was done, the harried young doctor helped me up, thrust my stuff into my hand, and pretty much pushed me out the door with instructions not to exercise for a week. No one asked how I was, did I need to sit down for a rest, or how I was getting home. Luckily my sister came to get me.
So I have reason to be grateful for the speed and efficiency of our medical system, and the fact that this won't cost me thousands of dollars. I have reason to be grateful for having a wonderful sister who came to get me from miles away, and for the friends and relations who kept me company by text and phone as I waited in the hospital and got in touch to see how I was later (and Kat who got me an Uber so I could go to the hospital in the first place). However, I am not grateful for the fact that the laser surgery I had was just to prevent greater problems, i.e., total blindness, and that the symptoms I went to the hospital with persist, and will continue to persist for God knows how long.
The world through my right eye looks as if I peering at it through a glass of water into which someone had poured a couple of spoonfuls of sand and coal dust, adding some motor oil for good measure and then vigorously stirring it. Luckily it's not my reading eye, which I use for working, but it also is, not so luckily, my "moving through the world with" eye, so having black floaty things swimming or darting around in it is not ideal. I am having a bit of a hard time adjusting. The sand and coal dust are tiny droplets of blood that were released into the vitreous from the retinal tear, and will disappear "in a couple of months" as they get reabsorbed. The floaty bits, I am told, will not go away, but I will supposedly get used to them, and not even notice them after a while. Then there is the minor issue of a haze around lights that was not there before and the inability to bring anything into focus, which I hope will also resolve with time.
So I am left pondering about the precariousness of things, and about how quickly something can happen to you. This happened in a split second. One moment I was fine, the next moment less fine. And it is the same with a stroke or a heart attack. A tiny, tiny, tiny thing in your body goes wrong, a tear less than a millimeter, a blood clot of the same size in the wrong place, and you are on your way to a hospital, or if you are not so lucky, the morgue. In my meditation class we are continually reminded of impermanence. It is something we are supposed to meditate on, and I have dutifully done so, but I never quite expected the reality of it to be brought home to me quite so immediately. Yes, in theory I understood and accepted that I will grow old and die someday. But I love looking at the world. I love its shapes, its colours, its beauty, and I had no idea I could lose part of that view so quickly. No idea. And now I know, viscerally, and that in itself may be as hard to get to used to as the dark things darting around in my eye, continually reminding me of it.
Postscript March 21: Good news! The sand and coal dust seem to be going away, and the motor oil is slowly dissipating! Now, speaking of the precariousness of things and of things which come at you blindingly fast out of left field, all I (we) have to worry about is economic collapse and a rampant pandemic ...
