Love is blinded

Every month or so I get shots in both eyes. Yes, by “shots” I mean injections, with a needle and syringe. I mean into the eyeballs.

At the consultation, learning about what lie ahead, I asked the doctor, How bad is it?

He said, “I’ve been doing them all afternoon. Did you hear any screams?”

I said, “Maybe you stuffed a sock in their mouth.”

He said, “That or a shot of bourbon. We give you a choice.”

Then the needles came out and the laughs quit.

I have age-related macular degeneration (AMD). My paternal grandfather, about 25% of whose DNA I’m toting around, went blind from AMD. Medicine had nothing for him; the VEGF-targeting drugs like I get came along in late 2004. I’m nearsighted, too, so without glasses the world is blurry.

He went legally blind, that is. With AMD, the central retina deteriorates but peripheral vision stays intact. When I gaze directly at something, I can’t see it. By moving my eyes slightly off to the side, I can. Sort of.

Out of habit, wanting an improved gander, I line up my peepers with the object in question – which immediately vanishes into a black hole.

*

The shots hurt about as much as you’d imagine. I’m given four rounds of numbing drops beforehand but we can’t really numb an eyeball, the doctor said. He’s right. If you want, we have a numbing shot I can give you, but that’s another shot, so …

After the third numbing drop, I can’t feel my throat when I swallow. The anesthetic has made its way to my gullet. Everything’s connected.

For the procedure I sit in a barber’s chair, tilted, while the doctor with his back to me unwraps the syringes and makes small talk. I hear him tap the side of the syringe. He places an eyelid holder on the first eye, which keeps it wide open so that I won’t blink. I must resemble, on half of my face, a cartoonishly surprised person. He squirts betadine into the eye. Look up, he says.

There’s a brief interval before the slowly approaching needle reaches my eye when I almost believe it’ll be painless.

The needle arrives and it isn’t.

Deep breath. Repeat.

Monday I said to the doctor afterward, This doesn’t become any more enjoyable as time goes on. A relief-joke non-joke.

I’d worry about you if it did, he said, and muttered something about his little shop of horrors.

*

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me,” Meister Eckhart wrote. “My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” I remember reading this as a teenager. When normal boys were out chasing girls I was up in my room with Christian mystics.

Thursday my analyst murmured, slashes of afternoon sunlight striped across his chair from the blinds, “Jung said that the face you turn toward the unconscious is the face the unconscious turns to you.”

Did Jung know of Eckhart? I walked home, careful on the broken sidewalks. Turns out Jung did. He discovered Eckhart as a teenager. Everything’s connected.

I’m more than a half-century out of adolescence now, occupied with second half of life matters, as the terminology goes. “One seeing, one knowing, one love” is an idea I can’t envision directly. But by moving my eyes slightly off to the side, I sort of can.