Wyatt Earp: "How are you?" Doc Holliday: "I'm dying. How are you?" --Tombstone (1993)
There could have been no blacker Black Friday than this one. At least, there hasn't been yet in my life. While other wives and mothers rose up at 2:30 AM to either get to the malls and stand-alone stores, or at least begin preparing for the trek, I awoke at the same time screaming in pain. While women and men bitched and moaned to themselves or others in line about their life challenges in having to wait in line or get up at such a ridiculous hour, I tried not to wake up Steven who snored next to me as I climbed down the stairs, weeping softly first, then louder, as I put distance between us. Soon, in the freezing cold basement, the door shut between the bottom floor and the top one, I could writhe in a heap, roll around and rock rhythmically, and neither father nor son upstairs would know a thing.
I wished I had all those people's typical Black Friday problems. Wait on line. Pressure to get the gifts, pay for them, wrap them. Bake cookies...whatever. I hurt like hell. I've hurt like hell for weeks, sometimes barely at all, sometimes a lot, but this...something was wrong. Something had gone very very wrong. Yes, I had an eye infection. It's a common parallel malady when you have Bell's Palsy. No matter how clean you are, no matter how much antibacterial soap you wash up with and antibacterial gel you clean yourself with, no matter how well you patch the eye, seal it with lubricant, air it out for a bit, then put on sterilized gauze and tape it for a bit, then air it more, then patch it again...you run the risk of the slightest speck of dust getting in there, and it's all for naught. Can you believe? You who can probably blink your eyes without thinking, who may never have had an eye infection, can not understand the horror of feeling your eye go dry, almost losing it, and then feeling as though a white-hot poker is in there, stuffed up your eye socket and pushing into your brain.
Steve has to open the store and run it. Little Steven is with me through the day. I try not to say anything. I keep putting in the Ketorolac antibacterial drops, knowing that the stinging and pain is supposed to be killing off the infection. Truly, the infection needs to be eradicated. I get that. I'm a big girl and I have a decent threshold for pain...I've had a cavity drilled without novacaine once (no lie). I'm a first degree black belt working on getting her second degree in Tae Kwan Do. I'm not a wimp. I'm not lazy. I am NOT being melodramatic. It freaking hurts!
As I apply more drops throughout the day, the eye grows weaker. The vision is cloudy. My pain gets worse, not better. I call up my father, who's home today, to see if he can drive me to the eye doctor. Maybe I need a different medication. But no, everyone on my side of the family has contracted a bug. They can't come near me, especially in my immuno-suppressed state. Steve is at work. He'd have to shut down the store, so his father drives over to get me and take me to the eye doctor, who numbs my eye (which actually is a blessing, despite the temporarily increased stinging) and then examines it through a framework of lenses.
"Well, the neurologist was right, you have an infected eye," he begins, carefully. "But he was wrong about the medication he prescribed you. I mean, normally, you'd want something like Ketorolac because it IS an antibiotic, and you do need that. But not in a dried up eye like yours. You wouldn't prescribe that kind of medicine for a Bell's Palsy sufferer if they're not making any tears. You're kind of frying your cornea."
My stomach dropped out of my body, through the chair, and into the floor.
"Have I permanently damaged my right eye, then?" My voice is a ruined whisper.
"I hope not. We'll prescribe you a gel, it should feel much better, and we'll see. I'll check you again early next week, but you come in sooner if you need to. Just walk right in, we'll take you, we'll move whatever we can. I'm so sorry."
So am I. You can't put a price on your vision. You can't put a price on being pain free, now come to think of it, either.
When I fill the prescription for the eye gel, it's a whopping $75.00 co-pay. I was upset enough at the $45.00 one for the previous antibiotic, and I really only used it for two days. Money just keeps getting poured down the drain...we've spent much more already on the other medications I took orally just to work more directly with the Bell's Palsy. Forget all the over the counter stuff I was instructed to get, too. The receipts keep piling up, and I'm just afflicted with Bell's Palsy. I can't even imagine what it would cost if, God forbid, it was something else.
Hold on. I went through infertility treatments for nearly two years before conceiving Steven. What am I saying? That was no financial pleasure cruise, either. Thank God we had insurance, good insurance at that. Until you need it, you just don't appreciate it...or the wretched life you'll lead without it if you needed it in the first place. Who knew this would happen to me? Bell's Palsy manifests suddenly, without warning. You don't know until it's too late.
When I put the eye gel in, though, while the actual application feels better than the Ketorolac drops, pain sears through my eyeball at double the rate I'd felt all day. I went into a white-hot mode where I could not do anything but rock, sometimes my limbs would shake like I was having a seizure. However, I was certainly in control of my motions...but I just listened to my body and went with it, trying to ride the waves of pain like a surfer, because to not ride them meant I would be drowned by them. I'd be sucked under by a bestial undertow of torture. Childbirth was about as bad, I have to say, and I do remember it--my son only just turned one a year and a few weeks ago. Lord knows I remember it.
When I could speak, eventually it was just a broken voice begging for my mommy. I hate to admit it, but it's true. The pain was so deep, so intense, so frightening and gutteral (my eye! my eye!) that I'd regressed. Someone had taken sandpaper and run it across my eye, then poured iodine in it. You think iodine on a scraped knee when you were eight years old was a tragedy? If that was pain, this was supersized pain with an extra side of hot apple pie. Thousands of bees stung my eye. It took every little bit of sanity I had left...and trust me, it was running away from me like the sands of an hourglass...not to tear out the eyeball. Because as much as it would stink to lose the eyesight there were moments, bitter, twisted moments, that I just wanted the pain to end, no matter what the cost.
I couldn't even call my mother to cry on her shoulders. She was the only well one in the family, and she was at The Gap working, because she has no choice. It's Black Friday. Every employee of her retail store was required to work that day. There's nothing bad, in and of itself about that. But I needed my mother. I needed my husband. I needed someone, anyone. I wanted to die. There are just not words enough to describe my pain. When I was brought home, Steve watched Steven and I kept putting hot compresses over my eye, on my right temple, over and over...the second the heat died, I would be at the sink, running the hot water, burning my fingers cherry red, just to buy myself a lesser form of pain by applying the compresses. I paced and paced, moving, to distract myself second by second, until I felt exhaustion strike...and I fell asleep, trying to release the pain long enough to embrace blackness.
I've awoken this morning and my eye is a tad less dry; I put in Lacrilube gel, and it feels...nice. I haven't used the antibiotic yet. I know I need to. But I want to do simple things like go to the bathroom, eat a small breakfast, maybe read some e-mails from friends who love me. Because if I put that gel in and even half of what I experienced comes to visit me today...I want to say I at least spent an hour free from writhing at the bottom-most level of Dante's Inferno. You go bake your cookies and wrap your gifts, you lucky sons of bitches. But don't you complain. I'll trade you in an instant.
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