Surgery in the Blink of an Eye

By the time I saw the specialist, I had been on retinal detachment watch for several weeks.

The ordeal started on the night I turned off the lamp next to my bed and instead of pitch black discovered a new, altogether novel, halo flashing on and off in my eyes.

I sat in the dark watching my own aurora borealis exploding in my field of vision. This would have been wonderful over the Alaskan tundra, but from inside my head it was more disturbing than exhilarating.

The next day, something that looked like a dancing stick figure--or a bobbing spider--appeared in my right eye.

“What’s the matter, mom?” asked my 11-year-old son over the breakfast table as I blinked at my oatmeal, rolling my eyes and contorting my face like a psychotic mime.

“There is this thing that looks like a daddy longlegs in my eye,” I told him.

“Aren’t daddy longlegs the ones that eat mosquitoes?” he asked.

Child logic, I thought, but what I need right now is professional help, so I picked up the phone and called a friend who is a doctor.

“There are flashing lights and a thing in my eye,” I told her.

“What sort of thing?” she asked as though I might be speaking to her this calmly if I had a Phillips screwdriver or a pen knife sticking out of my face.

“Well, it’s in my right eye,” I said, “and it’s like a transparent smudgy, squiggly line on a car windshield. Only it keeps dancing around.”

“Sounds like you need an eye doctor,” she said. “Or a choreographer.”

That afternoon, after spending the morning in my Ventura office watching visions dance before my eyes, my HMO sent me to an ophthalmologist.

He performed an eye exam that was as crude and painful as it must have been the day that Vlad the Impaler first devised it: He stuck a rounded metal probe into my fully dilated eye, making it bulge out of its socket, while shining a bright light into it.

*

“That’s quite a floater you have in your eye,” he said.

Floater sounded to me like a happy, goofy character from a Disney animated film, when what I had in my eye was a bouncy alien blob that was driving me nuts.

“It seems that your retina is hung up on the viscous material in your eye, sort of like paper stuck to glue,” said the ophthalmologist.

“Can you do something about it?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I’m not sure. If it gets worse, you should see a specialist.”

“Aren’t you a specialist?” I asked, incredulity and panic creeping into my voice.

“Oh no,” he said, laughing, as though the joke were on the dimwitted soul who actually believes our present health care system would provide patients with condition-appropriate physicians. “I am a generalist.”

“So . . . what do I do now?” I asked in a higher register than either of us was comfortable with.

“Well,” he said, “call someone if you see more flashing lights or notice a loss of vision like, say, a shadow coming down, or . . . “ and this was said in deadly earnest . . . “a pie-shaped piece missing from someone’s face.”

Great! Finally some useful information: Were I suddenly to notice sections missing from friends or associates, I was not to blurt out, “Hey, Bob, a segment of your head seems to have come off,” but instead go directly to a doctor. What a relief!

A week later I awoke to find that the little bobbing man now had a rather frenetic companion--Floater, meet Zippy.

Clearly, it was time for the retinal specialist.

The specialist turned out to be a competent and efficient physician with the bedside manner of Boris Karloff. But a ghoulish disposition seemed appropriate for a guy about to perform the same grueling exam as his predecessor, the more genial generalist.

His first look was inconclusive. “Come back in 10 days, he said. “We need to monitor this.”

Ten days later, after more rummaging around in my eyes, he announced rather abruptly, “We need to do laser surgery on both your eyes. You are at risk for retinal detachment.”

“What?” I blurted. “Why?”

“Because every time the viscous shifts, it tugs on your retina.”

“Well, how soon do we need to do this?” I asked, figuring maybe I could work it in sometime next spring.

“Right now,” he said. “We can do one eye today and the other one on Monday.”

“Ten minutes later, he had my eyeball greased up and attached to a lens, my forehead pressed against a bar and my chin in a metal rest while he blasted sunlight into my right eye.

“Look up toward the ceiling and to the right and DON’T MOVE!” he barked.

Zap, zap, zap--a series of light bombs went off accompanied by tiny bursts of a dull, burning pain.

“Now look to the right! Keep your chin down and DON’T MOVE!”

This, I thought, is how far technology has advanced. Doctors can now aim a thin stream of intense light through the pupil of an eye to remove cataracts, correct myopia, even prevent complete or partial blindness, and the procedure is done quickly and with minimal pain to the patient and no disfigurement.

But what keeps the laser beam from incinerating an optic nerve or blasting through an eyeball into the brain? A metal chin rest and a poorly socialized physician yelling “Don’t move” at the patient.

*

The procedure on the right eye took less than five minutes. The left eye, zapped three days later, was finished in less than two minutes. On both occasions I stumbled out, unbloody and unbowed, though with magenta lights popping in my head and a day’s worth of mild headache and blurriness.

Unfortunately, while the surgery lessened the risk of retinal detachment, it did nothing to discourage Floater and Zipper, from continuing to bob and weave across my field of vision.

So, I’m considering calling an agent to see if Disney is interested in a deal.

*

Wendy Miller is Weekend Calendar editor for the Times Ventura County and San Fernando Valley editions.