EYE-VEY

May 10 2013In Siena this afternoon, during an even more extensive eye examination than the one in Provence last month, there was an unquantifiable period of time when, while struggling to decipher il Dottore’s Italian – medical and anatomical terminology included – with the aid of an on-screen image of my eyeball magnified a thousand-fold, the “fly” clearly visible, the words ‘laser,’ ‘possible,’ ‘surgery,’ clearly understandable in any language, my actual eyeball so drastically dilated that even now, some 4 hours later, it looks like a transplant from a barn owl, there was a period of such soul-destroying despondency and disorientation that I wondered why the f-ck I had thought that leaving the by now familiar, if not enamored of, reality of America to live in not one but two foreign countries was a normal if not essential decision.To give you some idea of the need to cling to the familiar while experiencing profound disorientation, you should know that I actually thought that my dear friend Luana, who like il dottore speaks no English, was translating for me when she repeated everything he said in slightly slower Italian. Not to mention, that during this serious explanation of the possible seriousness of my condition I was doing my best not to vomit while looking at my gigantic, intricately detailed eyeball on the screen, with my for real, gigantically dilated eyeball.Did it help my stress level that Luana and I stopped first to buy ourselves’ each a pair of fine Italian boots? Not really. I would have to say that this was the first and only time in my entire life that the acquisition of new footwear provided no thrill whatsoever.Nor did it help, after leaving il Dottore, to find that wearing sunglasses did absolutely nothing to prevent the glare of light from penetrating said dilated pupil while clinging to the door handle of Luana’s tiny car as she blithely careened around traffic circles in total defiance of on-coming tractor-trailers.But you see, this is one of the things I love about the Italians: their sense of drama, their insistence upon it while at the same time dismissing it. You hear it all the time, on the street or at dinner table, people yelling at each other, gesticulating imperatively, if not threateningly, while at the same time totally ignoring each other. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here: the 50/50 ness of life is full on; the continual racing toward the edge of catastrophe before deciding it’s niente and treating oneself to a gelato.So I shouldn’t have been in the least surprised while yearning to sob alone in a darkened room, to find myself, halfway home, shopping for fruit in a gigantic supermarket while Luana went off in search of fish. You, dear reader, may think nothing of it either until I explain to you that here, you don’t bung a few things in your wagon and take it to the cashier to figure out. No, here you must, in Italian of course, read the sign accompanying every fruit to find its code number which, with my wild eyeball was somewhat like playing pinball while wearing someone else’s prescription glasses. Then you must take the apples, the pears, the bananas, and the white peaches to the scales and punch in the hopefully correctly remembered numbers for each item, wait for the priced label to issue forth and make sure you stick it on the appropriate bag. If you’re feeling adventurous, as evidently was I, and decide to riffle through a box of cherries in order to bag the ripest, you’d better don a plastic glove first or you and your eyeball could be ejected from the supermarket pronto.And all this time I was thinking, really Maggie, you’re been dramatic. So you had six rounds of dilating drops, placed your eyeballs up against a machine that pretty much blinded them when the flash went off, before being instructed to look up, sideways and down, (was il Dottore pointing at the floor or his penis?) before surrendering to the despicable instrument that places the upper eyelid over the top of your head and the lower one under your chin so il Dottore can have a good old look around while illuminating the eye ball in such a way that I could see the veins. Oy.Cherries finally picked, bagged, weighed and paid for, we got back in the car, chattering away as if Italian were my native tongue; as if between the boots and the cherries niente had happened. So you can imagine my relief when, dropping me of at the farm, Luana said, “It’s a perfect time to go to bed and rest your eye.”For those of you interested in the results of the examination here they are:The floater is huge and may or may not eventually drop down below the pupil where I will no longer see it and where there will be no danger of it intermittently pulling on the retina as it is now doing and which could eventually cause the retina to tear.  If the flashing light returns I am to call the doctor immediately whereupon he will perform laser surgery. In any case I will have to be examined again in another 3 months. By then I’ll need a new pair of sandals and local water melon will be in season, the selection of which will be a whole lot easier than picking cherries with one eye in the pot and the other up the chimney!