In the summer of 2016, I was living in Brooklyn and due for a new contact lens prescription. I used very rigorous criteria to choose my optometrist: I picked the one directly in front of a good playground in Park Slope, so my wife and I could take turns getting our eyes checked while the kids played. I went first, hoping that the kids would work up their appetites while I was with the doctor, and then we could find something delicious to snack on while Mommy went to her appointment. I’m great at making these kinds of plans.
I’m not a model patient by any means but I try to behave myself and I follow instructions well. I read the letters on the far wall and then placed my chin on the dystopian device and looked straight ahead. The doctor positioned himself on the other side, looked through his end of the machine, and gasped.
Actually, I think he said, “Oh my god.” But maybe I added that detail later.
He certainly didn’t just go “hmm” or say nothing at all, which is what doctors are supposed to do. He snapped back in his chair in horror and exclaimed something that was either “Oh my god” or damn close, and of course I was terrified.
When he gathered himself, he explained—calmly now—that I had the worst eyes that he had ever seen, and then asked me if I’d ever experienced certain symptoms like a curtain falling over my field of vision or bursts of fireworks in the back of my eyes. These, he told me, were signs of retinal detachment, and if I hadn’t experienced them already, then he was sure I would experience them soon.
He puffed out his cheeks and said he would write me a prescription anyway; I could order new contacts and glasses and they’d be ready in a few days. For whatever that was worth.
I stumbled out into the sunny Brooklyn late morning and traded places with my wife, doing my best to hide how stunned I was. The kids had not worked up an appetite, but that was fine because I had totally lost mine. I spent the next half hour shielding my eyes with my hands and panicking every time a car drove by and reflected a glare into my eyes—was this detachment, so soon, or just a regular windshield blinding?
My wife popped out a few minutes later, came straight to me, and said, “The doctor says your eyes are fucked.”
“He’s not supposed to talk about that with other people, right?”
She shrugged. “Well, he did. He said you have serious issues.”
We agreed that he was an unprofessional asshole for doing that, and resolved to put it out of our minds. And she did, actually, as far as I can tell. But I didn’t.
My kindergarten teachers were the first to figure out that I couldn’t see very well. Within the first few weeks, I was in a doctor’s office, reading the letters on the wall. According to family lore, I kept getting them all right until my father guessed that I had memorized the chart when we walked in. The doctor produced a different chart, and I failed miserably.
I was never self-conscious about my glasses—it all happened so quickly that I just accepted it as life and nothing more. The girls I spent most of my time with never said anything negative, and theirs was probably the only opinion that mattered to me anyway. Nobody called me four-eyes; if anyone called me a nerd it was because of the nerdy things I did, not because of the glasses; and enough of my childhood crushes were reciprocated that I never felt ugly. I knew enough not to put tape on the bridge—that was crossing the line into social outcast—but my glasses never broke there, anyway. Usually it was legs that snapped off, and it was socially acceptable to use tape there.
I never worried about bullying, either: whether bullying someone over glasses is a Hollywood myth, or a Boomer-specific trauma, or I just got lucky, I don’t know. Once, in ninth grade, I was in a class that wasn’t Shop but was basically Shop (Industrial Arts, maybe we called it?). A boy my age made a comment about my glasses, and I let loose with a vicious one-liner.
I don’t remember what I said because my mind immediately shifted into a defensive posture. I can be extremely mean, and in my youth I had limited control over that magic power. I am very observant and I replay scenes in my head over and over again, rewriting scripts and coming up with things that I would never have a reason to say out loud. Once those thoughts are thought, I load them like arrows into a quiver, just in case I ever need them. I probably had a dozen such arrows that I could have used that day, whether specifically tailored to this guy or guaranteed to wound anyone our age. So, again, I don’t know what I said, but I remember that once I said it, I thought to myself, very clearly, “He is going to hit me now, and very hard.”
The whole class went “Ooooh!” and covered their mouths, and I frantically mapped out my possible escape routes, hoping for one that would give the teacher time to intervene and save my life. But the boy didn’t chase me. He kept his eyes on mine for a while, then dropped his head and walked out of the classroom. Some speculated that he was crying, or about to. It felt to me like everyone kept a distance from me for the rest of the day.
Fun side note: his older brother and my older sister were friends, and it wasn’t until the end of the year that Older Brother saw us together and made the connection. He told her that I was a real bully.
It didn’t bother me, either, that every year my glasses got a little bit thicker. It was a gradual change. I started with chunky kid-friendly plastic frames, but by the time I wanted wire frames the doctors advised against them because of how much lens would be exposed. In middle school I was able to switch to wire frames because the doctors said that there were new advances that made lenses thinner. I was so excited, but then they came and the lenses still stuck out about a quarter inch. I couldn’t imagine how thick they would have been without the new technology.
When I started high school, my parents and doctors recommended I switch to contact lenses, but I resisted because a) nobody tells me what to do, and b) my teenage sister was always getting eye infections because she wouldn’t care for the lenses properly, so she’d walk around with bright pink eyes all the time even though I thought she looked very pretty in her glasses. But eventually I relented, and agreed to try contacts.
It took me more than two hours to get the first pair into my eyes, and I never learned how to use only one finger to remove them—I always had to pinch with my thumb and forefinger—but I learned to take handwashing seriously, so that was an upside. Not having glasses also revealed the small brown skin tag that I’d had on the side of my nose for as long as anybody could remember. It had always been obscured by the nose pads on my glasses. One day, in the shower, I used a pair of nail clippers to snip it off. It didn’t leave a mark or get infected, so my ill-advised self-surgery was excellent. I’d brought a hand mirror into the shower with me and I thought I looked terribly romantic with blood and water coursing down one side of my face.
But that was later. Getting contacts at sixteen mostly meant learning how to rebalance my head, and wash my hands regularly, and make sure that I knew where I was going to spend the night, because my prescription was high so my contacts were expensive. A friend of mine stayed over once, unplanned, and left her contacts by the sink in Dixie cups filled with water, which she forgot about in the morning and threw in the trash. But hers were cheap and she wasn’t upset. I couldn’t afford that.
My prescription got worse every year, and eventually I had to get special contacts that were weighted so that the light passed through them at a precise angle. The weight only half-worked: they’d shift at the damnedest times and then everything would be weirdly out of focus, as if I was looking through an aquarium or a sheet of plastic wrap.
Years later, in Sri Lanka, a tuk-tuk tire fired a small rock directly at my eye, cutting through my contact lens and giving my cornea a serious nick. The doctor suggested that I might never wear contacts again. I sat in the dark for two days reading Scott Pilgrim with only ambient light until I could finally tolerate sunlight again, and then I tried my contacts on. They didn’t sting, but I knew this solution wasn’t going to be a permanent one.
I asked a doctor if I was a candidate for LASIK, and he laughed outright. I asked if there were any other options, and he said no, but confirmed that I would eventually be done with contacts. As it was, mine was the highest prescription that he had ever written.
I don’t know if they make contacts with a stronger prescription. As I learn every day, there is a lot that I don’t know. But I know that when I went online to buy a new set, the highest available number was lower than the one on my prescription. Maybe there is a more special store that I could shop from, but none of my doctors told me.
And then I went to the optometrist in Brooklyn, the one who had a physical reaction to my eyes and then blabbed to all the patients that came after.
As soon as I had a chance that day, I took out my phone and started doing research (okay, “research”) on retinal detachment and macular degeneration. I didn’t sleep that night, or for many nights afterwards. At the end of that summer we moved to Uganda, and I slept under a mosquito net in a room that never got fully dark because my house was surrounded by floodlights that I was advised to never turn off because of crime and monkeys, and I’d look up at the textures of the semi-dark and wonder if I was seeing or imagining sparks or shadows. All the literature emphasized that if I saw either, it was a medical emergency, but I had no idea if there was anyone in Kampala that I could see in the middle of the night, and I was scared to talk to my doctor, or anyone, about it. So I just stayed awake, heart pounding, until exhaustion inevitably defeated anxiety.
I channeled my fear into a short story. I turned myself into an African-American widower living in South Florida. Oh, I also made him a fitness enthusiast. That seemed like enough camouflage to make my true self invisible. My character had two young sons, and I don’t think the story explains what happened to the mom, but having no adult to help made my character’s plight more acute. Real-life me had a support system, so if anything went wrong, I knew there would be someone to at least guide me to the asylum.
Anyway, my character (in the story) stays up all night worrying about his eyes until he finally drives himself crazy and wills himself blind. He has a panic attack and his parents come from far away to take him to the hospital, and the brain scans show that his eyes are functionally fine (can brain scans do that? I didn’t care) but he still can’t see. The story ended with one of the doctors talking to her husband:
"We're all hanging from a thin thread over an abyss. It could snap at any moment, for any reason."
"I don't want to think about that," he said to her.
"None of us do," she answered back. "That's the point."
In 2018, I visited a new optometrist, this one in Massachusetts. I dreaded the entire day. I’m sure he’d never seen such a nervous patient. He looked in my eyes, made no sounds whatsoever, and gave me the same prescription as before. I nervously asked him if there was “anything irregular” there, and he shrugged and said, “Nope.”
I hoped this would ease the anxiety caused by Dr. Brooklyn, and for a little while it did. I went ahead and ordered the nearest prescription of contacts that I could get, and the actual correct prescription of glasses in case I ever decided to switch back—glasses are so inconvenient, though—and went about my business.
But during that same trip I visited a dentist who did such a poor job drilling a cavity that a dentist in Egypt wondered if I’d had it done in a back alley, and then I visited a primary care doctor who decided to lower the dosage on my regular medications without asking me, which threw off my equilibrium for more than a year until I saw a specialist and demanded that he fix my dosage and get me back on track.
So I learned to distrust American doctors, and retroactively Dr. Blasé-About-My-Eye seemed more unprofessional than reassuring. I crafted a new set of arrows that I would unleash at him or any other doctor, given the chance. Oh yes, I was looking forward to getting kicked out of someone’s office.
Some time later, I found an article in New Scientist about a breakthrough in treating blindness, and then I started to regularly sweep the Internet for the latest news. Somebody had a microchip put into their eyes that let them see in fuzzy black-and-white. Not great but I’d take it. In his later years, Borges could only see a yellow glow in the periphery of one eye, and he spoke of it appreciatively. Fuzzy black-and-white was better than that.
Another year, someone had a probe implanted in their brain that reacted to special glasses and allowed them to see. I could definitely do that, if they were affordable. In any event, I was sure that by the time my eyes finally gave out, there would be alternatives.
As part of my work duties, I attended a conference for disabled persons that talked about accommodations but also celebrated the achievements of people living with, among other things, blindness. I met a blind graphic designer who had scored a university scholarship and was now working for a national magazine. I met others who said that they didn’t miss their eyesight at all, that in fact they felt they had an advantage over others because they had turned their weakness into a superpower. I got all caught up in the debate of whether or not disabilities like blindness or deafness should be corrected, or if we were looking at disability the wrong way completely. I began to feel like whatever happened, I would be okay.
I wrote another story, this one a novel. In this one I cast myself as a suicidal young woman in her early twenties, of unspecified ethnicity—again, the master of disguise that I am. Among the many reasons her life is falling apart—not the main one, mind you, but one of many problems that have made her want to give up—is that she is already experiencing macular degeneration: there is a dark spot in the center of one eye that is growing slowly but perceptibly.
“Are you going to go blind?”
Macy hesitated. “Eventually, yes.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. The spot happened fast, but then it stopped spreading. But they say that if it happens in one eye it will probably happen in the other, too. I might not go totally blind, but basically the middle of my vision is not long for this world.”
Claire blew her breath out in sympathy. “What made it do that? Do you know?”
“I guess when they put me together they didn’t read the instructions right or they skipped a step or something. They used the wrong kind of glue. And now it’s coming apart.”
“God screwed up.”
“Basically.”
That was as fair a description as Macy had ever heard, and she liked it.
Over the course of the novel, though, our heroine finds a reason—many reasons, actually—to live, and at some point she comes to accept her fate with something even slightly more positive than hope.
As did I.
In 2025, I was living in the Middle East and due for another eye exam. I sat with a doctor and told her my whole story. Her response was reassuring: “Your prescription is very high, so yes, you are at an elevated risk for retinal detachment and macular degeneration. But elevated, not high-risk. Yours isn’t even the highest prescription I’ve seen today. But tell me, why haven’t you considered corrective surgery?”
I came home armed with a stack of pamphlets and cost estimates. The procedure I settled on would involve removing my lame-ass natural lenses and replacing them with a fancy science ones. My Science Eyes probably wouldn’t be as good as good natural ones, but, as has been demonstrated, I do not have good natural ones.
But what about the superpower, about disability not being a disaster but just a different way of being? None of the surgical options would reduce my risk for retinal detachment or macular degeneration. Those remained a possibility for me to confront some day. I’m not saying I’m brave enough to look at that head-on and say, “Bring it!” But I don’t feel like I’m dangling over the abyss by a thread, either. What the surgery would get me was a fix for the mechanical problem: contact lenses that don’t work all that great, and glasses that are annoying. At stake wasn’t whether or not I would someday go blind; that is a question about fate that only time can answer.
Or less charitably: I was humbled by the courage of the people I met at that conference, and then humbled by my lack of it. But that doesn’t seem quite fair, either.
Because the procedure is irreversible, my doctors decided to rule out other, less-invasive procedures. The first was LASIK—apparently I could plausibly be a candidate after all, and the operation would be both faster and cheaper.
I took a battery of exams that were impressively high-tech. I looked at colored dots and swirling lights and at one point one of the technicians smooshed my head against the machine to get the correct angle. Somehow that made it feel very serious.
In the end my doctor and I looked at detailed maps of every side of my eyeballs, and the doctor—a no-nonsense woman with a deadpan voice and sensible ponytail who probably had perfect grades but can’t tell or understand jokes, and would be an annoying stereotype except that she was real and actually talking to me, and yes, she probably would look very pretty without her glasses and with her hair down, damn you Hollywood!—walked me through all the pros and cons.
The trouble was that decades of contact lenses had warped and dried the surface of my eyes. We decided that for two weeks I would not wear contacts at all and see if the eyes would correct themselves. I also got prescription-strength eye drops that I had to use several times a day.
I returned after two weeks and learned that my eyes were only a little better, and so we agreed to try for two more weeks, and then two more weeks after that. At the end of six weeks, the dry patch was still there, and so we moved on to plan B, which is something called an implantable contact lens. However, the surgeon looked at my case and said he wouldn’t do the procedure on anyone over forty.
So we went back to the lens replacement, which is what I’d wanted from the start. They took my measurements again and told me they would have to import my lenses from the UK. It would take two weeks. I paid for half of the operation and then walked away happy.
And then Iran and the United States started lobbing missiles at each other, and my employer decided that keeping Americans in the region, given the circumstances, was too risky, so I was ordered to return to the United States. “Temporarily,” they said. “Two weeks, probably. Six weeks, tops.”
I arrived in the States on a Saturday. The next day, the doctor called to tell me that my lenses had arrived and that they could schedule me for the next day, if I was ready.
I won’t try to weigh my personal tragedies against the actual death and destruction brought on by the 2026 Persian Gulf war. Measured against everything, mine is insignificant, and I won’t make light of that.
But within the context of my own life, every day that I spent away from my permanent lenses made me more anxious. For the first time in a while, I started checking for signs of retinal tears or macular degeneration. My prescription had been off for years but now it really bothered me. And I worried that if I aged out of one operation, would I age out of another? Furthermore, living across time zones meant that I was awake and wearing my contact lenses far longer than normal—was that a risk? Oh, and the overall anxiety. With me, sleep is the first casualty of anxiety. Six weeks became six months, and I’m not sure I slept through the night even once.
But then my employer decided that the Middle East was safe, after all—actually, the team in the region was always convinced, but the decision was in the hands of our Stateside colleagues who were far more cautious—and almost exactly six months later, I was back. After I got over jet lag, I called the eye clinic and they told me they wanted to rerun all of my tests. I went back in and looked at all the lights and the colors and had my head roughly handled again—more annoying this time—and then my no-nonsense non-funny doctor told me that I was clear to go. The surgeon met with me and we made an appointment for Saturday morning, three days from then.
It was real, it was finally happening.
It felt exactly like when I blurted my insult to the boy in ninth grade. I said what I said, and now something very real was going to happen.
And I finally started to freak out.
Irreversible is a heavy concept for me. Of course, changes happen all the time, but they tend to be gradual and understandable. Even major things, like getting married: you can just get unmarried if you want to. Or even cancer: it can be treatable under the right circumstances. I’ve known people who walked up to what seemed like an abyss, and then pulled out of it, as if it had never happened.
Once, in Peace Corps, a friend of mine chopped her own thumb off preparing firewood. She wrapped it in a baggie with some ice and ran to the bus stop to catch a three-hour ride to the capital. The thumb got reattached, and after a few months it was like nothing had ever happened.
Compare that to a video that makes the rounds on the Internet of a guy getting his pinky ripped off by a shark. When it’s over, he doesn’t laugh and say, “Look at this, a shark bit me!” The look on his face shows he gets it: one minute ago he had a pinky, and now he doesn’t, and never will again.
Permanent things, irreversible things. When my first child was born and I looked at him in his little plastic bin and I was like, “Oh shit, he’s never going to not be here now. This is…real.”
Because what’s permanent? Death. So everything else that is permanent, that’s a little taste of death.
No, that’s too dramatic. But the idea that a decision that I make will have consequences that can never ever be undone…this worries me for some reason.
And it wasn’t until that handshake, agreeing on a date for this random dude to remove my natural eye lenses forever, that I understood what I had signed up for. And now it didn’t seem like a good idea.
The day before, I was testy. I’m more mature than I was in ninth grade, so I didn’t snap at my loved ones any more than I normally do, but the night before the operation (stop me if you know where this is going) I didn’t sleep at all. My tossing and turning disturbed the dog. My heart wouldn’t stop racing.
The surgery was at 8:30 in the morning, which meant I had to make sure I wouldn’t oversleep. I have a very tempestuous relationship with time, and if I have to be somewhere at 8:30, I need to wake up no later than 4:00 am, even though it only takes me ten minutes to get ready, I don’t eat breakfast, and the clinic is only fifteen minutes away. Don’t ask me why I’m like this, I just am.
I set an alarm for 5:15 because even I recognized that I was being a maniac, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t sleep the entire night, or at least not for more than a few minutes at a stretch.
It was a very tired me who showed up at the clinic in the morning. The nurse, who was maybe the only person in the building who didn’t speak English, took my blood pressure and recorded a number so crazy that I won’t report it here. Then she said lots of nice things that I couldn’t understand, had me step into a gown and put a cap on my head, and told me to wait for the surgeon. Or I assume that’s what she said.
The surgeon came and explained that because of the shape of my eye, he wanted to mark it first before going into the operating room. So I sat in front of another dystopian machine and he took out what looked like a straight-up pen, and he made marks on my actual eyeball itself.
This was definitely a mistake.
And then, just like that, I followed him into the operating room. Everybody in lab coats and blue slippers like Mark Wahlberg in The Departed when he kills Matt Damon. Good lord.
The surgeon told me to look straight ahead at the most blinding light I’d ever seen, and to resist the urge to close my eyes or look away. He said there were two lights, and if I concentrated, I’d be able to see them both.
I stared ahead and it was an almost physical pain that went through my body, but like I said, I try to do what I’m told so I focused and eventually, yes, there were two distinct blobs.
And then his hands were all over my face, and I could see the point of a needle in my vision, and then he said calmly, “And I am inside your eye.” As if I were joining a thought already in progress.
What happened next was the most dazzling light show I could ever imagine. Huge smears of blue and orange and white moved across my vision, sometimes clarifying into two distinct orbs, sometimes blurring into a giant blob of color. Blue seemed determined to swallow the others.
It was actually beautiful, and unbearable. My legs tensed. The surgeon reminded me to breathe. I gritted my teeth. He called for the lens and I heard some mechanical beeping, like a metal detector searching for old buttons and earrings at the beach.
Just as I thought to myself, “This is the longest ten minutes ever!” he leaned back and said, “I’m finished. That was perfect.”
And then he put a giant plastic cup over my eye—like a jockstrap cup, not a Dixie cup—and told me it might feel uncomfortable for a few hours but I’d be fine. Don’t get the eyepatch wet, don’t rub it, and come back tomorrow so he could take it off.
But by evening I had to know, so I did a minute of thorough research online and learned that the patch was more about keeping me from poking at it than letting the eye heal. “It’s like the cone of shame for a dog,” I reasoned, and took the patch off. What I saw was amazing. It was my bathroom. My own face looking back at me in the mirror, exactly like I expected. Nothing more and, more importantly, nothing less. A miracle.
I took it off again in the morning, and only put it back on when I was getting out of the taxi, so that nobody in the clinic would know.
The surgeon wanted to make a big deal about the reveal, but I cut him off, because I’m a bad patient and a bully but I also feel compelled to confess my crimes, always. “I cheated already,” I told him. “I took it off last night.”
Half-confess, at least.
The first surgery was on Saturday; the second was on Monday. This time I slept well and went to the clinic in a good mood. And then I started to worry. Was I being too cavalier? Did that mean that the doctor would also be too cavalier?
The nurse who didn’t speak English didn’t say as many things to me that I couldn’t understand, and she didn’t bother showing me my blood pressure readings, either. The surgeon marked up my eye with a pen just like before, but all he said was, “You know what to expect this time.”
I did, of course, but I really did appreciate the whole show that I got the first time. Presentation is important. What if this was the day we took it all too casually and I ended up with only one working eye?
Twice during the procedure he told me I needed to open my eyes all the way, something he hadn’t said at all during the first operation. And the second time that he said it, he sounded really annoyed. “It is very important,” he reminded me. In the same tone that I use when I tell my carb-loading cat that I’m going to put him in another room if he keeps begging while I eat. If my first operation was perfect, then my second was shaping up to be Jaws 2.
It took a little bit longer this time, and the surgeon sounded less triumphant when he said that I was done. I could tell that I had been a bad patient. But I did my best. I said I’m more mature now; I didn’t say I’m actually good.
Once home, I held out for as long as I could before I needed to take the patch off and see what the result was. I steeled myself for the final fuck-up, but, honestly, everything looked great. I was told it would take a few days or even weeks for my brain to fully adjust to my new eyes—I could see halos come and go around the lights, and the objects in my bathroom would sometimes swim out of focus for a moment—but for the first time since I was five years old, I was looking out onto the world with my own naked eyes and actually seeing something.
Science Eyes, sure, but mine.