Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker

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Hello Wonderseekers!

This week's newsletter is a bit different (and longer), in part due to the multitude of well-wishing messages I received about my upcoming eye surgery. (Thanks for those!) I hope you enjoy the below and look forward to returning to our regularly scheduled programming next week!

Eyes

“So what should we have today?” my mom asked brightly. “A monkey? Or maybe a panda?”

“A panda!” I exclaimed. And then my mother, armed with her Sharpie marker, drew a panda’s face on the thick flesh-colored eye patch that I would wear that day. She did this day in and day out for what felt like the better part of a year. Each morning, a different animal to make the patch-wearing seem less onerous for my seven-year-old self.

Having inherited poor vision from my father, my eyes were even worse than his, and my right eye, in particular, had been stubbornly deficient. The patch was an attempt to improve the weak right eye by blocking the stronger left one. Wearing it was incredibly disorienting, uncomfortable, sweaty, and, in the end, useless. The right eye simply wouldn’t arrest its steady decline.

It was a few months later, after a visit to my eye doctor (an odd man who made me curtsy to him before and after every appointment), when I was asked to sit outside while he spoke to my mom. Through the door, I heard the doctor tell my mother that the patch hadn’t worked and that, at this trajectory, I would most likely go blind. Not the legally blind that I was already (my prescription was so high that the arms of my glasses wouldn’t close because the lenses were too thick) but the “blind blind” that was always a looming specter. I heard my mom cry softly and then pull herself together to come collect me from the hallway. We went and had coffee milkshakes from Zesto’s and my mom did what moms always do — hid her fear to save me mine. I didn’t confess I’d overheard that conversation until many years later.

What followed that prognosis was what shall be referred to as the “kitchen sink years.” My parents began exploring every conceivable solution for my eyes. First, it was getting me contacts so my life wouldn’t be lived behind Coke bottles. According to my eye doctor, at 8 years old in 1980, I was the second youngest person in the country to get them. My mom had to put them in for me as my tiny fingers were too small to balance the liquid-filled disk. There were the trips to far-flung world-class clinics. Hours upon hours of dilation and painfully bright lights. Countless questions of, “Is number 1 better or” (interstitial of the click click clicking of the viewfinder) “number 2?”

And when I say every conceivable solution, it was not limited to the ophthalmological realm. Included were visits to Catholic faith healers who anointed me with holy water, prayer groups who included my eyes in their devotions, and psychics who told my mom what other remedies we should seek.

In the end, the “kitchen sink years” finally ceased when I became a teen, and my eyes simply stopped getting worse. They plateaued at -16 dioptres in the left, “good” eye and -18 in the right. So, while I didn’t go “blind blind,” my life still revolved around my wonky eyes. Always sat in the front row of classes. Learning to identify people by their gait, not their facial features (and yes, everyone has a very distinctive gait). A natural loathing for eye-gouging umbrellas. Crawling on all fours, looking for lost contact lenses. (My mom was Jedi-level at finding lost contacts. Her hands deftly skimming the surface of many a shag carpet to locate the little buggers. In those days contacts were expensive and difficult to source at such high prescriptions. I still struggle now that they are so cheap to bin them, so ingrained in my childhood psyche their preciousness.)

So when, at age 48, I was told I had early onset cataracts that required surgery, I wasn’t surprised. I knew that high myopes (people with prescriptions higher than -6) had an increased incidence of early cataracts. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the fear. So much of my life was spent with an acute awareness of the precarity of my eyesight that the prospect of eye surgery was terrifying.

I had my “bad” eye done first. I really only used the right eye for a bit of depth perception and peripheral vision, so if that surgery went awry, I felt prepared for that loss. Thankfully, it went without a hitch, but it has still taken me two years of procrastination to get the other one — the “good eye”— done.

So that’s what I’m doing tomorrow, and I’m not looking forward to it. Rationally, I understand that cataract surgery is so common that in developing countries, it’s performed assembly line fashion in parking lots, but this fear isn’t rational. When you’ve had a lifetime spent contemplating the actual nuts and bolts of blindness (learning braille, knowing the wait time for a guide dog, what the bumpy strips on sidewalks near intersections are for, etc.), signing a release form that lists blindness as a possible outcome hits different.

But it hasn’t been all bad. People with high myopia have higher verbal cognition. Researchers think the genes that make our eyeballs grow bigger may also grow a larger cerebral cortex. And when someone who is very nearsighted looks at an object close up, their wonky eye acts as a microscope, seeing detail lost on average sighted folks. I can read that zoomed-in way in the dark, too, as my rods (the part of our eye that helps us see in low light) are elongated. I’ve spent my life, quite literally, seeing the world in a different way.

That’s why I asked my doctor not to correct my vision when he changes out the lens. Most people end up with 20/20 vision after cataract surgery, but my eyes, for all their faults, have gotten me this far, and I’m not prepared to permanently change how I see the world. He thought I was nuts, but in fairness, he allowed me the choice.

I guess there is a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe it's about playing the cards we are dealt, or perhaps more accurately, about not only bearing but embracing our oddities.

What odd part of who you are would you not be willing to part with?

With wonder,

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