Seeing Red

It swam across my vision, a wisp of reddish-brown smoke, then swirled as I turned my eye to try to see what it was. The blood seeped within the clear fluid, shifting and spinning with every flick of my eye.

“That’s strange,” I mumbled.
“What?”

My wife was watching cable, back-to-back episodes of some real estate reality show. I shifted my eyes left, right, left. The swirl was beautiful, and reminded me of a murder mystery special effect.

“Something’s happened to my eye,” I said.

I was looking up, because the white ceiling made a better backdrop, studying the flow of two fluids mixing. I recognized my intellectual curiosity. It was my unemotional brain taking over as a defense mechanism.

“I’ve seen floaters before,” I said, “but this is… more.”

My wife muted the television, turned to look at me. I didn’t lower my eyes, just kept staring at the ceiling.

“Call Kaiser,” she said.

She knew me well enough to make it a command rather than a question. Her tone added to my growing fear of the unknown. I stood and walked to the phone. The concern I saw on her face reminded me to stay calm. I smiled, but felt the lie at the corners of my mouth.
I ignored the brownish haze filling my right eye and tried to make out the tiny markings on the back of my health insurance card. Unable to read the phone number, I pulled on my reading glasses and forced myself to focus. Even so, I was only able to remember and dial one digit at a time.

After a brief wait, and a short conversation with the nurse, I was talking with a doctor.

“You need to go in to the emergency room,” he said. “Your retina may be torn. If it’s not taken care of, you could have a detached retina.”

I was used to medical exaggeration. Lawsuits tended to encourage doctors to give very conservative advice. I knew the drill.

“Can it wait until morning?”

It was Friday night and I didn’t really want to spend hours in the hospital emergency room waiting for a doctor to tell me I was fine, exposing myself to who-knows-what diseases.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” he said. “You could lose the sight in your eye.”

Silence.

My heart beat faster. I realized I was taking shallow breaths and took a long deep one, which ended as a sigh. He must have heard my indecision.

“If you don’t go in to the emergency room, at least lie down facing up. It will put less pressure on the torn retina, if there is one,” he said. “But tomorrow morning you have to go and see a doctor.”

I hung up the phone.

“I have to go to the emergency room,” I whispered.

My wife stood up, got her coat, and without a word waited for me by the front door.
I fought back my anxiety and frustration as I headed out the door for yet another trip to the emergency room, as if getting out of bed each morning weren’t reminder enough that I was old, that I was going to die some day, that I needed the help of someone else along the way.

“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said.