It is Tuesday and time to write a 'Slice of Life."
Thank you Two Writing Teachers for creating this supportive community
of teacher-writers!
My eyes were irritated, and more so in my left one. I hoped it was a simple infection, another byproduct of time with grandchildren, but a glance in the mirror confirmed my fears: there was no redness and no visual difference between the two eyes.
This means it must be the mole.
Somehow, I missed all the marks of my anxiety’s favorite game – feeling unusual symptoms just before my annual eye doctor appointment.
Thirty years ago, my eye doctor discovered a mole behind my left eye, an internal mole, something that can’t be seen without a special camera. He assured me that it is probably nothing, yet he has to take a picture of it every year and compare its size and shape to that of the year before. It has not changed one iota in thirty years, except perhaps in its ability to make me fret. Aging is weird like that. My father had all sorts of problems with one eye and was basically blind in it by the end of his life, and this invisible-to-me mole feels like some parallel to his health issues. Regardless of the doctor’s reassurances.
At the eye doctor’s, I had my usual thorough exam. I read the vision chart. The doctor dilated my eyes and I waited alone in the dark with my active imagination. He returned and we sat knee to knee with my chin in the stirrup of the eye machine while he issued commands about staring straight, looking this way, no blinking. I moved to the second room and sat perfectly still at the eye camera and stared into a bright green star without blinking, over and over again, each eye.
Everything. Was. Absolutely. Normal.
No change in the size of the mole, no changes in my eyeglass prescription, even. All is fine. What a waste of time worry is! Though it did leave me with a poem:
my eye feels dusty filmy off there’s something pestering in the most benign way as if somehow a spot of honey slipped onto an eyelash or two and each blink kisses other eyelashes which struggle to separate from the sticky caress double vision? no spots? no blindness? not yet I just feel odd
Thank you for visiting my blog. Clicking the title of any post will open a comment box at the bottom of the page. I love hearing from you.