Checking In With Grandma

I picked up some spectacles the other day. Kaiser mentioned I had $150 credit towards a new pair of glasses, so I thought I'd get some, and maybe have enough cash left over to get me some sort of random Procedure. I haven't bought glasses for a while. $150 doesn't even get halfway around your face.

I've worn contact lenses since I was a teenager. In the sixties, getting used to contacts was an ordeal of the first order. They were thick and rigid and putting them in was like dipping little hubcaps in hot sauce and stabbing them onto your eyeballs. An hour is about all you could stand of that, and you were expected to bump that up by fifteen-minute increments every day until you either went blind or nuts or got used to them. It was painful, but pain was no match for teenage vanity. The first time one of the hubcaps slid off my cornea and began to travel across my eye, I flew into a panic. Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in? Ultimately, I got used to them, although if an eyelash wedged in underneath it could cause me to fall off the sidewalk, weeping.

Over the years the product became lighter and thinner and gas-permeable and altogether more bearable. I never went over to the soft variety. One day at a softball game, a towering fly came to me in right field. I yelled "I got it I got it I got it" and deftly snagged the ball with my eye socket. That got the runner to third and me to the emergency room, where the immediate task was retrieving my contact lens before my eye swelled shut so tight they'd have to send in a team of spelunkers. Do you know that the average emergency medical cabinet contains tiny little toilet plungers for just that purpose? The doctor pries your lids open and takes the little plunger and goes doink and there's your lens.

So there have always been difficulties with the contacts, but it's a pretty good system overall. After you turn forty, something needs to be done about the close-in vision, so instead of bifocals, they give you one lens for distance vision and one for reading. Your eyes and brain duke it out and finally work something out amongst themselves. But then after another fifteen years or so, you discover you're kind of an old lady and things dry up, including your eyeballs. Now the contacts are starting to get a little cranky. It's nothing like the hubcap debacle, but towards the end of the day they begin to feel a little like Ritz Bits, salty side down. This is when I decided it might be prudent to get a spare set of $150 glasses, maybe just for the evenings, and three hundred additional bucks later, I have some. They're tiny and light, with progressive trifocals, and they work amazingly well. I can see everything very clearly as long as I'm peering out of the correct part of the glasses, and soon I hope to have mapped out which parts work where. I haven't put my contacts back in, to my surprise, and may have just become a four-eyes again, after forty years.

It's not that I don't think I look dorky, but maybe I just don't care as much. I did take a quick glance in the mirror. That's where Grandma lives. I don't check in with her often, but maybe I'll start. She was a sweet-faced old lady.

I incyst

Dave and I just came back from Kaiser, where he underwent a surgical procedure to evict a cyst from personal territory. The cyst was benign but uncomfortable. For Dave, that is; the cyst itself was probably snug as a bug. Everything seems to be okay so far. The entire admitting process was reassuring. A series of folks in scrubs came in to ask questions, one after the other, pretty much the same questions, all designed to make sure they had the right person on the gurney and were all planning to do the same thing in the same location. When you're operating in highly personal territory, you want everyone on the same page. So everyone who came in wanted Dave to tell them who he was, and they all got the same answer, even after they'd slipped the joy juice in his I.V. and he might have been inclined to claim he was the king of Siam. And they asked him the same question I get with every Kaiser visit: is there anyone at home you're afraid of? "Absolutely," Dave said solemnly, and the nurses glanced at me and burst out laughing. (Note to self: develop an edge.) Anyway, all personnel were professional and cheerful and calm, and there would have been no reason to feel anything but confidence except that Dave had already been in for this precise procedure four years ago.

After that one, there was plenty of discomfort and outright pain and it went on for weeks and weeks, until finally--not wanting to seem like a complainer--Dave called up his surgeon with a few questions. The surgeon was dismissive. He explained that he'd done this to that and so of course there was going to be some pain. Now Dave is not a whiny man, and doesn't care to have it implied that he is, and he does have a high tolerance for pain. I mean, he's not going to sit through a Michael Bolton concert or anything, but still. So he carried on best he could for a while and when there was still no relief, he insisted on an ultrasound to check things out.

The ultrasound technician said everything looked just fine. "Except for this cyst over here," he added, "but it's benign." "Benign" is all well and good, but "begone" was more what we were going for. It was as if the surgeon had plunged down to the murky depths, pried open an oyster, snapped it shut again, and come back up with the bends and the willies, and when asked where the pearl was, said: "Pearl?" It all seems so pointless. It's a lot of trouble for nothing. It's going to Paris for a Big Mac.

So this time we arrived wary and lawyered-up. Not really; we're not litigious sorts, but between the last surgery and this surgery, our nephew had passed the bar, and that should count for something. He mostly represents condo owners who are suing construction companies for shoddy workmanship, which is not particularly germane to this case. But still, going with him seems like a better bet than threatening someone with our niece, the Peace Corps worker.

The surgeon came out to the waiting room right after this last procedure to tell me that everything went well. That's what he told me four years ago, too. He sent us home with a bunch of bandages and a bucket of Oxycodone, but I should have asked for the pearl, too. The nurse in Recovery gave us instructions and supplies, and he also told me that I should be giving Dave foot-rubs, even though that's nowhere near the surgery site. Dave's home now, resting up, but our cat, Tater, with her unerring instinct for the exact square foot in the house she is least welcome, is sizing up his lap, tail twitching. If anyone needs me, I'll be a half mile down the street.