When I was seven years old, my doctor let my parents know that I was going blind in my right eye. Other things that happened that year have conveniently escaped my memory. Oh, I do know that I was in Miss Wingate’s third grade class. She was an amazing teacher, a pianist who had us place notes on musical staffs and then played them (adding chords) in such a way that we all felt like musical geniuses. I keep digressing (must be the meds).
Here’s what happened:
My mother, long before there was a Google, found a surgeon in New Orleans, Dr. Robert Wagner, who could do the surgical procedure to repair a busted tear duct. That’s why I was going blind. I know “blind” is now an unacceptable term, but back in 1949 that’s what we called it. I had a friend, back in the mid-90s use the old cliché of “the blind leading the blind” in a conference paper she delivered in Portland. Someone stood up in the back of the room and shouted “UNSIGHTED! Not blind.” So, please don’t be offended: that’s the word I thought of in those days when I was only seven years old and still relatively innocent.
I have written about this before in an essay that was originally published in Ascent magazine when that was still a print magazine. I’m not reproducing that here because its focus is somewhat different, but you can see it at my website in an essay called “Thinking About Poetry.” As I said, my mother found a doctor in New Orleans who had done the kind of surgery on other children necessary for repairing my tear duct. We were fortunate that my Aunt Lou and Uncle Eddie lived in New Orleans, on Alamanaster Avenue, and that we could stay with them. My father’s health insurance, courtesy of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, paid the medical and surgical expenses but did not cover things like transportation from Beaumont to New Orleans once a month for a year or for lodging and meals. As I wrote in the first entry for this blog, “It Takes a Family.” I suspect I would have lost sight in my right eye had I not had relatives living in New Orleans.
At first, it was all just an adventure: a train ride to New Orleans on The Sunset Limited, visiting my aunt and uncle, seeing the street cars running down the middle of the avenue, eating soft shell crab po-boys from the corner store, reading comics my aunt had graciously provided. But then came the trip to the hospital and my examination. I do not remember much about Dr. Wagner and that initial examination nor do I remember much about the hospital itself. Here’s what I do remember:
I am lying on a narrow bed in a surgical room. I look up. A black rubbery mask descends. I hold my breath until I am forced to breathe in. I fall asleep. That’s it. That’s all. When I wake up in what I now know is the recovery room, I have a string running through my tear duct and down through my nose. It is a circular string. I am told that I must pull on the string once every two hours to keep the passage open. I have no idea of what this means, but my mother is taking notes. I am to return for another examination in one week and then once a month for six months. When I get back to the house on Alamanaster Avenue, I have 25 individual letters waiting for me: one from each of my classmates at Junker Elementary. I have grown cynical enough to realize that this was a class assignment: Miss Wingate never missed what later teachers would call a “teachable moment.” Still, it was nice to get the letters. My mother kept them for decades but they are now lost, probably forever.
The next week, my mother could not get off work. She arranged for my Aunt Lou to meet me at the New Orleans Greyhound Bus Station and take me back to her home and then to make my doctor’s appointment the next day. The whole thing was great fun: traveling through most of Louisiana with the bus stopping at each town, first stop was in Orange, Texas, along what people still called the Old Spanish Trail.
This was before Interstate 10 and U.S.-90, my favorite highway, was the preferred route, the route my family took every summer when going to visit my grandmother. Years later, when I was 17, I would hitchhike down that highway to New Orleans (see “Hitching to Somewhere” in James Duncan’s Hobo Camp Review) for a very different purpose: to lose myself in what Philip Slater called The Lonely Crowd and perhaps find myself instead of restoring my vision. Dr. Wagner said everything looked okay but to be sure to pull the string every two hours—advice I mostly took, but was too young to be religious about. Fortunately, my mother was much more stringent about such things than I was.
As the months passed, the bus drivers got to know me. I confess that I much preferred the train but that was much too expensive. They called me by my name and kind of adopted me: the young kid who traveled alone from Beaumont to New Orleans on a regular basis. I was famous all over the southern Greyhound network. Today, airline flight attendants take care of children traveling from one city to another but that was not common in the early fifties on the buses that were the primary movers of travelers without cars from one place to another. We were all more innocent in those days.
Next: A less difficult operation but a much worse doctor
No comments:
Post a Comment