The verb stare has two meanings. Opposite meanings. To look fixedly at someone or something, or to look vacantly. The intensity of the first cannot be denied—often, it’s accompanied by deep concentration or malice. There’s that ‘cold stare’ we offer when pissed or annoyed. It carries the weight of intimidation. Other stares contain anticipation, concern, curiosity, longing, and sometimes just bad manners.
Yesterday, my vision seems to have degraded. A sharp pain shot through the bottom of my left eye. It felt like something released. If a noise accompanied the pain, it would have been a boing—the sound of a spring breaking. Since then, my double vision has been worse—I think.
I’ve felt this pain before. Years ago, playing racquetball, my opponent elbowed me in the eye. He’s a big dude. He knocked me off my feet and into the air. The corner of my metal framed glasses flattened on impact causing a small gash next to my eye. For a week or so, I sported a black eye. And for the next few years, randomly, pain shot through the eye. I likened it to being bitten by a horsefly on my eyeball. I might be sitting in a meeting and suddenly I would jerk my head back and gasp. Everyone stopped talking and stared at me wondering what the hell my problem was. An eye doctor told me that the pain was caused by damaged nerves coming back to life.
I’ve dealt with double vision most of my adult life. In 1995, I crashed my bicycle into the side of a van and clonked my head something awful. Since that day, my vision has been deteriorating. I simply can’t make my eyes point in the exact same direction, yielding two images instead of one. To fix this, my eye doctor adds prism to my eye-glass lenses. Prisms bend the direction light travels. Even though my eye lists off to the side, it still sees what’s directly in front of me. The eyeball drift gets worse every year.
Shortly after my bike accident, I had surgery to correct the double vision. Now, twenty-five years later, it’s time for surgery again. Meeting with the eye surgeon the other day, he measured the distance my eyes drift apart. “Your case is complicated.” I joked that complicated wasn’t an encouraging diagnosis, and he seemed to get annoyed with me. “That isn’t your diagnosis, just a description of what we’re trying to correct.” What he meant is that not only do my eyes drift apart horizontally, but also vertically. He’ll cut and shorten two muscles in each eye and try to tug my eyeballs into the proper direction so they operate together.
It all seems rather hit and miss. My doctor already cautioned me that there is no guarantee my double vision will be completely gone after surgery. The stated goal is to reduce the double vision dramatically so my vision is easier to correct. Susan and I have differing opinions of what this means. I think there’s a twenty percent chance that they’ll get it right. She thinks there’s a twenty percent chance that they’ll get it wrong.
Now I wonder if yesterday’s boing-event changes anything. I can’t be certain, but it seems like the double vision got worse. Susan says I should message the doctor to let him know about this change, but I’m not even certain my vision changed. Going back to the doctor again would make me feel like a hypochondriac.
As I write this, I pause and stare out my back window while I search for the proper word or phrase. The woods at my property edge blend into a mess. I can’t pull the line of trees into a single image, so I don’t try. It’s more comfortable to look at nothing than doubled images. My surgery is in five weeks. It might take a month after that to get glasses that fully and properly correct my vision. In the meantime, I practice my vacant stare. Hopefully once my vision is fixed, I can break that habit and start to stare again in a more intentional way.
Previously Published on jefftcann.com
