the time (last month) when i convinced myself i was going blind
Me and my gotdamn retinas.
I’m sitting in the waiting room at the retina specialist, waiting for my doctor to spare me five minutes of her time, to shine lights into my eyeballs at every possible angle. Whenever she does, I can see each and every vein—it’s weird to see with your eyes what’s in your eyes. Creepy.
My eyes are dilated, and I can barely see, but the TV is playing some home improvement show and they’re in the north of England—Lancashire, Wigan—which is actually pretty weird considering my partner is also from the north of England—Lancashire, not Wigan1. We laugh about this for a little before I get back to tending to the heavy, always present feeling in my chest.
My anxiety is spiraling. I am whelmed, as per uje.
Back in 2023, I found out my retinas were wrecked. I’m sure there’s a technical term, but I just say wrecked because it’s easier and also more dramatic. Since then, I’ve had two laser treatments to seal up a bunch of tears, one on each eye. Apparently, it’s not anything I can actively fix. It’s more like, We can’t do anything about this but treat it so that it probably doesn’t get worse to the point where you straight up can’t see. This, obviously, is little comfort to me.
Most of what I know about retinal tears, I’ve learned from late nights doomscrolling on Google and Reddit. My retinal specialist doesn’t really offer any insight and usually can only muster a couple of words to any questions I might come up with. She’s nice otherwise, I suppose.
Still, I decided a few months ago to put an indefinite moratorium on Googling things about me retinas—yes, I am prone to shouting Me retinas! sporadically throughout the day—especially so when I’m on one. With my defenses already down, a quick search will have me completely and utterly convinced that I’ll be going blind around this time tomorrow. The other day, for example, I was doing quite a good job of not Googling anything, I was just minding my business, you know? But then something came up about Dame Judi Dench’s macular degeneration (another retina thing!), and even though I don’t have that, not at all, it made me think there could be a possibility that I actually do, despite any evidence whatsoever to support that theory. After a couple of hours, I was convinced there was a chance I only had 10 years left of being able to play Stardew Valley and watch K-Dramas. It made me very sad and also very anxious.
Logically, I understand that my insistence on jumping to anxiety-ridden conclusions is both unnecessary and unhelpful. However, the older I get, the more my anxiety—especially anxiety surrounding certain facets of my health—gets to a point where nobody can tell me nothing. Still, I sometimes go through the motions of talking it out with someone else, so it’s not just me in my head. The other day, I was talking to my sister, explaining very logically how I went from the reality of my thinning, tore up retinas to the conclusion that I was on the precipice of either a. early onset macular degeneration or b. full-on blindness. She very kindly pointed out that I sounded insane. I kind of see where she’s coming from, but her retinas are fine and she’s not highly myopic so I’m not exactly counting her as an expert in this field.
My sister and I both deal with anxiety, but she has noted lately that it seems like mine has gotten progressively unhinged. She’s not wrong. We talk a lot about what we can do to help ease that anxiety, but we never really come to any conclusion.
From where I’m sitting, there’s only so much that long walks for my mental health and deep breathing can do for me. I’ve been considering lately that maybe I should get back on the hard stuff (Lexapro? Maybe a lil’ ‘Butrin?) to make living more bearable again. But then, I’d have to deal with health insurance and a bunch of other stuff, which will also make anxiety burn and flash in my body: my chest, my stomach. I am in a semipermanent freeze state and the only solution is spending ten to fifteen minutes on the phone with someone who hates their job.
Whenever I do manage to call someone about an insurance thing I don’t understand (all of it), they are either unfailingly nice or unfailingly mean. I only ever think about the latter. One woman started going off on me because she didn’t like the way I was breathing, so I told her that I have a literal anxiety disorder and I was just trying to deep breathe my way into not having a panic attack. She got nicer after that, but only marginally.
I’m pathetic, but whatever. At least I’m fun sometimes.
Once I actually see my doctor, she asks how things went after my last appointment, where she sealed retinal tears in my left eye. I want to tell her that my eye was so sore I thought there was a slight chance it might just fall out of my face and roll all over the floor, collecting my dog’s hair until it came to a stop at this carpet I thrifted once in the Catskills. Instead I just say, “It was fine. But it was sore for a while.” She nods as she adjusts my chair, saying, “That makes sense. There were a lot of tears.”
She says everything looks good. I’m healing up well. There are no new tears to report. She’ll see me in six months. I let out a sigh of relief, a breath I wasn’t fully aware I was holding. At checkout, the kindly man—I’m saying kindly like he was 60, but he was definitely under 30—gives me a pair of cheap sunglasses inserts that ultimately keep trying to escape my glasses frames.
When I get home, I work from bed. The curtains are drawn and I’ve cast the inserts aside—after they fall on the floor multiple times, I decide it’s better to just wear a cheap pair of sunglasses over my prescription ones. My dog aggressively paws at the blanket, insisting to get under it and to cuddle with my leg, or else, and I let him in. I again feel the unfamiliar prickle of relief, cozy in bed with my clingy ass dog. The pressing weight of anxiety—of being absolutely sure I’m halfway to being Hellen Keller (but Black… and less problematic)—is lifted.
I feel good for the first time in a long time, and even though I know it won’t last, I enjoy it while I can.
Gregory would like me to tell everyone that I’m downplaying just how close Wigan is to his hometown. He has a lot of pride in this place called Chorley, apparently.