I may, in the past, have been known for my hypochondriasis. Not a real, paralyzing case, but certainly one that has turned moles into mountainous tumours, if you will…
Since my travels in Africa, and after having survived many potentially debilitating diseases and accidents, I generally take my ailments in stride. After all, I do fancy myself invincible. However, every now and then, something comes my way that makes me think that maybe I’m exhausting my 9th life.
Over the past few weeks, I’d been experiencing some ocular problems. Plainly said, I was losing vision in my right eye. So, after several trips to the optometrist, an inconclusive diagnosis and a major campaign of alarmism on the part of my eye doctor, I decided to look up the potential causes of this ensuing blindness.
I narrowed it down to two diseases: Brain Tumour. Multiple Sclerosis. Ok. Ok. Ok. I’m no doctor. That’s for sure. But all roads lead to Rome and, similarly, all Google searches led me to these same diagnoses.
In consultation with Tabby, my best friend, who happens to be a doctor, we decided that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to take a trip to Emerge. One would think that in a situation like this the decision-making process would be simple. On the contrary! I was worrying about abusing the already stretched medical system, while Tabs was weighing the pros and cons, knowing full well that this would cause us to lose a day in the sun.
I freaked myself out sufficiently by reading every symptom of my two imminent ailments and convincing myself that I had every single symptom of each. Finally, we decided to head to the General Hospital and squat for the day. Let me just say right here that I have the best best friend in the world. She worked 24 hours on Friday and was gonna work another 24 hours on Sunday… She basically spent her one day off this weekend in, you guessed it, the hospital with me , never complaining once, despite her burning desire to go to Bluesfest.
I can’t tell you how lucky we are to live in a place where, although it may take 9 hours of sitting around, we can receive superior quality medical care by a team of professionals who are exceptionally conscientious, thorough and personable, not to mention, hot. During our wait in the ER, we made some friends, of course. A middle aged man with really cool glasses sat down beside me and I couldn’t but hit him up for conversation when he opened up his little MacBook (I need to buy a used one for the documentary I’m making this summer). Handsome Alberta Pastorman (HAP) chatted us up for a good long while about his ministry in Africa, his wife and the life in Fort McMurray. His wife, Hotstuff Type A, showed up a little later and, feeling some kind of kindred connection with Tabs, whisked her away for some private pep talk. HAP and I shared our respective symptoms with one another but then eventually got bored of talking to one another. Actually, my eyeball started to hurt from looking at him at an uncomfortable angle so, as I am wont to do, I took out my book and made it clear that I didn’t really want to talk anymore.
As I have now learned, this presentation of acute vision loss is quite serious because, as I mentioned, it could be a symptom for something much worse. And I am at the prime age for developing MS. Consequently, the docs ran the battery of tests on my brain and my eyes. The CT, which made me feel like I was being sent into space on a rocket ship, ruled out the brain tumour. That made me happy. Though I had said to my brother the day before that I would rather have a brain tumour than MS. It’s kind of a hard decision to make, I suppose.
Then we were sent to the eye institute. This place was like a deserted ghost town. It was kind of a relief really since we’d been in ER mayhem all day long. Tabs found this book: The Norton Anthology of English Literature. So we tried to read it to each other. We started with what was probably 17th century English lit (plus or minus a century… I really have no conception of literature’s time continuum). Tabs tried to read it, but she could barely string together a full line without stuttering. As she put it, “All this stuff is written in crap English.” Then we got to Gulliver’s travels, which begins with Gulliver writing a letter to some guy who he’s totally pissed off at for having altered and cut his journals and messed up all the dates. That part was kind of boring so we skipped to the first tale of the travels. This appeared to be moving in the right direction of intrigue, even though he mostly was talking about the angle of the sails and the wind currents, when our peace was suddenly disrupted by this woman with a detached retina who was sent here from Prescott for immediate surgery. She was the afternoon/evening manager at the one and only Tim Horton’s in Prescott and woke up that morning with blurred vision in her right eye. I immediately commiserated with her. Then her ENTIRE family arrived: two fat men, one of whom kept joking about how he would gladly scoop out her bad eye if someone would just give him a spoon, he two teenage daughters who were more interested in themselves than their ailing mother, but who were rather amusing nonetheless with their typical teenage narcissistic interventions about how one was pulled out of work for this ‘event’ and how the other one had her own eyeball pulled out of their sockets one time.
When the resident Hot Doc arrived, he was wearing tattered jeans, an old polo-style shirt and a backpack. He simply introduced himself as Mike. This guy was so wonderful and thorough. After he was done shining the spotlights in my eyes, I was truly blind. But he was able to confirm that I didn’t have optic neuritis, which meant that I don’t have MS. The senior resident came in to look into my eyes and figure out what, then, had been causing this loss of vision. He found something called CSR (Central Serial Retinopathy, or something kind of close to that) which is either caused by stress or use of steroids. Tabs then pointed out the size of my biceps to the doc who, for a moment, didn’t know whether or not to believe that I was a roid junkie.
He sent me home with a clean bill of health and told me to take it easy. But just as I was leaving, Hot Doc scurried back into the room and said, “Would you mind if I took one last look at your eyes? I’ve only ever seen CSR in text books!” Totally dying inside over how cute this little doc was, I offered my eyes to him along with my cougar soul and let him shine his light on me once more.
And so, for now, I will continue to be indestructible and assume that I have a few more lives in me.
