“We hang by a thread in this world of wonders and terror.”

Since July, I’ve been having regular appointments with a retinal specialist in Vancouver, a result of an emergency referral on the part of my ophthalmologist in Sechelt. During an examination, he found some retinal tears that he felt would need treatment by the specialist because he didn’t have the equipment required to repair tears very close to the edges of the retinas. Ever since I fell on ice in Edmonton in late November of 2018, resulting in retinal hemorrhaging and tears, I’ve had to see the ophthalmologist fairly often. Mostly the appointments are routine. A couple of times he’s discovered additional tears and he’s repaired them. But in July, I was referred to the specialist. The first time I saw him, just a couple of days later, he repaired 5 tears in my right eye. He told me my retinas were threadbare and that he would need me to return again in 4 weeks. On the next visit, there were 3 new tears in my left eye. On the visit after that, just a single tear, also in the left eye. The procedure for repair is lengthy. The lasers themselves aren’t particularly painful though I feel some of them all through the bones of my face: a fierce tingling pressure. But the thing the specialist and his residents who perform the procedures under his guidance, anyway, the thing they use to keep my eye open is like a crochet hook. They pull the edges of my eye and I find that excruciating. My eyes themselves are frozen and numb but not my lids and not my face. The first time I had the procedure in July, I had dark bruises on my upper cheekbones for a week afterwards.

Last week I saw the specialist and was so relieved to be told that there were no new tears and the ones that had been repaired had healed well and everything looked good. My next visit will be my regular ophthalmologist in Sechelt in 3 months. I have a list of things to watch for but no one mentioned the sensation I realize I’ve had each time I’ve had a retinal tear: sustained periods when I see spangling, like small circles of silver light, just to the side of my field of vision.

This morning as I swam my slow kilometre, alone in the pool for the last half, I thought about vision and what it means. The Mirriam-Webster online dictionary defines it this way:

the special sense by which the qualities of an object (such as colour, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived through a process in which light rays entering the eye are transformed by the retina into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve

So that’s how we see, literally. Light rays and electrical signals. But there’s also more:

a

: the act or power of imagination

b(1)

: mode of seeing or conceiving

(2)

: unusual discernment or foresight

a person of vision

c

: direct mystical awareness of the supernatural usually in visible form

When I was in the reclined chair in the dark treatment room, I tried to take myself away, through an act of the imagination. My imagination. I tried to take myself to the lake in summer, early morning, myself the only swimmer, dragonflies stitching light to the surface of the water, and a kingfisher settled on a low bough of cedar, the one that hangs over the shallows. It would help but then it didn’t, because the procedures went on for so long, the first one nearly 3 hours. The second time, I tried to think of the scars that would develop as a result of the laser burns. I tried to see them in my imagination as a series of buttons sealing my retinas so that fluid wouldn’t get behind them and take away my sight. My vision. I was imagining my threadbare retinas as a fabric repaired with delicate buttons, born of heat.

As I swam, I was seeing a tapestry of buttons, all luminous, reflecting and refracting the light. When I got home, I shook out some buttons from the tin where I keep them, and I thought how they resembled moons, too, perforated by two eyes: mine. I felt that shimmer that I often experience when I’m on the threshold of writing. How to take the experience of lasers and buttons and make something of them. I’ve written about my eyes and the injury sustained in 2018. In one of the essays in Blue Portugal & Other Essays, I wrote about a quilt I made to help me understand what had happened, my experience of tests and entoptic phenomena, the path that led back into my teen years when I recovered from another serious accident.

When I take up the quilt, I hear the silk rustling. It is almost alive under its top of patches and panels. Rustling like bird wings, something I could hear with my eyes closed. If I close my eyes, I hear the silk, the sound of rain on the roof, the restless movement of the cat investigating the boxes behind my desk. I push my thread through the holes in the shell buttons, two eyes side by side, tender stabs with a sharp needle. For a moment a tiny button hangs on the thread as I fiddle with a tangled bit, trying to ease it out. By a thread. We hang by a thread in this world of wonders and terror. On a path of indigo cotton, black silk streaked with gold, squares of grey flannel, linen the colour of midnight, these silvery buttons will make a small light for anyone walking in uncertainty, in hope, scarred or whole, the whole dark length.

I feel like I need that light now. Maybe you do too. The world is teetering, it seems to me, in a way it hasn’t in my lifetime. The only way I know to anchor my fears and apprehensions is to take that dark path to where it leads. I have these beautiful buttons, tiny lights, and because of the miracle of lasers and specialists, I also have my vision. Both kinds.