I’m Stuck Inside With Nothing To Do But Write Self-Deprecating Humor

They say if I go out, my skin will shrivel up like a vampire’s.

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I’ve been living with a chronic condition the medical community calls a “choroidal nevus.” It sounds deadly, and I could probably milk it for pity until you found out what it was. It’s a freckle. That’s all. The only thing that makes it interesting is that it’s inside my eye.

A freckle in my eye. It’s like a twinkle, only different.

A frickin’ freckle

It’s not debilitating. I can’t see, feel, smell, or taste it. It’s an area of darkened pigmentation that the medical bigots say “shouldn’t be dark skin, it should be white.”

The ophthalmologist who found it told me it was no big deal. “Just keep an eye on it,” she said, giggling at the silly joke she says to all her patients.

So, every year I went in and they said “it’s fine,” and the next year “it’s fine,” and on it went for fifteen years of “keep an eye on it” jokes until one day it wasn’t “fine” anymore.

“It’s angry,” the doctor said. “I don’t like it when it’s angry.”

I wasn’t quite sure if that was another Ophthalmologist joke, but it turns out they have only the one joke and he was serious this time.

A leakin’ freckle

“Leaking,” was his folksy way of describing an internal hemorrhage. Turns out my little freckle had started growing blood vessels as fast as nostril hair and they were ‘leaking’ in between layers of the retina.

We all know about cones and rods and that big nerve in the middle, but layers? He told me our eyes are like onions — Retina, macula, sclera, choroid, and more. I learned more that day than I could fit in my tiny brain, but the important part was that I had a veritable jamboree of blood pooling up somewhere in there and it was starting to affect my vision.

I’m a fixer and I know things. I know how to tighten door hinges and oil squeaky furniture so I said, “Just suck it out with a needle, doc.” What could be easier?

“I can’t do that, you idiot,” he said. Actually, he didn’t say the “you idiot” part but it was implied. He said something about needle gauges and brought up retinal layers again and I zoned out.

His first attempt to repel the invaders was to inject medicine into my eye, specifically into the vitreous humor (finally, some humor). That’s the goo in the middle of your eye that keeps it inflated.

Stick a needle in yer eye

Pause for a moment here and envision the process of injecting medication into your eye. It’s not like a vaccination in your shoulder where you close your eyes or turn your head and look away. There’s no closing or turning here. You have to watch the entire horror show from start to finish with your eyes wide open — the sharp point slowly moving at you then a pop, squeeze, blurp, and it’s over, ouch.

“Whew, that was rough,” I said as he washed my eye. “Will that solve the problem?”

“Oh, no. We’ll need to do that every month for the rest of your life,” he said, cackling maniacally.

After a few months of torture, I learned that I was a candidate for a more exciting procedure.

“What could be more exciting than needles in your eye,” you might ask.

Lasers! (I’m doing air quotes while writing this). Lasers in your eye are far more exciting than those primitive piffling needles.

Stick a laser in yer eye

“We shine a bright laser into your eye to cauterize the blood vessels,” he said. “If it all goes well, the leaking stops.”

“And if it doesn’t go well?”

“More needles,” he said.

“But how does a laser penetrate the layers to get to the vessels,” I asked as a well-informed patient.

“We inject a dye into your bloodstream and the laser activates the chemical, shriveling up the vessels,” he explained. “But don’t worry, we inject it into your arm so you can look away.”

Since I’ve become inured to watching needles pop in and out of my body I no longer needed to look away. But I did because I could.

The laser treatment was a sequel to that other horror classic and I was forced to watch it all the way through, just like before. Except this one was longer. It was three minutes of kaleidoscopic images brighter than the surface of the sun.

Now I know what ants feel under a child’s magnifying glass.

It felt good to finally blink but for several minutes I saw nothing but brilliant white light regardless of whether my eye was open or closed.

I’m a vampire now

“Everything went fine,” the doctor said. “Come back in 2 months and we’ll see if your leaks are fixed. And don’t forget to stay out of the sun.”

“I’m sorry, what? Stay out of the sun?” I said.

“Oh yeah, didn’t they tell you? You need to stay out of the sun for five days.”

“Five days! Why on earth is that?”

“The sun activates the chemicals in your bloodstream and your skin will shrivel up.”

“Like a vampire?” I joked.

“Yep, like a vampire.”

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