Bubble Vision

by Steviepinhead

Having this bubble inside my left eyeball is pretty entertaining, most of the time. It wobbles and wiggles like that good old jellyroll. It undulates the way the earth must when its bell gets rung by a tsunami-sized quake. It’s not nearly as big as it was at first: if you closed your right eye, looked down at your lap, and made a fist about the level of your sternal notch--about the place you would put the squeeze on if somebody started choking to death at the next table over--then the bubble would just suffice to cover the shape of your fist. Your fist would look a little enlarged as it fell “beneath” the bubble--that fisheye lens effect--and the bubble would be tinted a nice indigo shade around the edges.

There’s just one bubble at the moment, but this morning there were two or three baby bubbles skittering around the mama bubble, adhering right at its rim-line (where the tint of blue is the darkest). Sometimes the babies were snuggled up against each other like beads on a necklace. Sometimes, as I moved my eyeball back and forth or jiggled and joggled my head, toweling off after my shower or tripping downstairs for breakfast, the transmitted motion scattered the beads to separate perches around the circumference of the larger bubble. If they rolled around to just the right positions on the dial, the assemblage bore a remarkable resemblance to Minnie Mouse (or maybe Mouse Woman, the mythical mediator between humans and spirit powers).

When the bubble was bigger and newer, it occasionally shook itself into two or three bubble segments of roughly the same size, with flattened interior membranes. This was cool, since it yielded a fly’s compounded view of the world, like going back 550 million years and taking a different evolutionary tack.

In addition to the bubble, I have some teensy new “floaters” in my left eye. I haven’t decided yet if these are true floaters, or miniscule defects in the retina itself. True floaters are usually filamentary or fuzzy, not as dark or distinct as these little pinpricks. These also fly in tighter formation than the usual floaters. So maybe they are “spot-welds,” vestiges of the laser’s passage, like hot spot tracks on the globe. Whichever, they are small enough that I expect I’ll learn to ignore them.

The bubble is more disconcerting, but then I don’t have to get used to it, since it is in the process of shrinking, evaporating like a black hole. Two weeks ago, what little I could see was almost all bubble, which was like trying to watch your neighbors’ TV through a window blocked by their kid’s fishbowl. Then, the bubble had more of a pinkish-yellowish hue. A week ago, when the bubble filled about half the visual field, it had gone to lavender, and just today it’s turned this intense indigo. I assume the deepening spectrum has to do with the size of the bubble--the longer red wavelengths got through when it was bigger, but now only the shorter blue wavelengths will fit.

Even with my left eye closed, I still see the outline of the bubble, unless there is absolutely no light leaking through the lid--a dark sun, the indelible after-image seen by one of those old-time army guys, rousted out of his barracks and trucked in the back of one of those puke-green flatbeds to watch an A-bomb test from way too close to ground zero.

When the bubble filled the eyeball, it was hard to see anything else. A sight line running directly through the center of the bubble was distorted the least, like looking directly down on the “flat” earth from above. Any other sight line passed through more highly-curved arcs of the bubble, distorting images beyond recognition. It was reassuring, though, to look directly “down” through the bubble and see my blurry fingers waggling back at me. Right there at the end, back in before-bubble time, I could wiggle those fingers for all I was worth, and not see a single one of them.

You can’t see the bubble from your side of the eye, so you’ll have to take my word about it. From out there in the world, my left eye looks very red on either side of the iris, and the pupil is visibly dilated, like the left side of my brain was coming off a supreme ganja extravaganza. For the first several days, my eye was so goopy and ugly that I mostly kept it closed to spare the innocent. There was an Invisible Man’s worth of gauze wrappings that first night in the hospital, but they didn’t leave those on, and they didn’t issue any kind of a racy piratical replacement patch either--too many different drops and ointments to be administered too many times a day.

The only clue that I was about to receive my very own eyeball bubble was a new floater in my left eye, first noticed a few days before the long Memorial Day weekend. Of course, my eyes have always been problematic--I got glasses in third grade for nearsightedness and I reached the geeky coke-bottle stage by high school. Wire rims and lighter plastic lenses permitted a modest makeover in time for college, and hard contact lenses delivered me from the four-eyed phenomenon just in time to enjoy a post-college year as a ski bum. The left eye was always weaker; bifocals and reading glasses have been staved off in recent years only by tweaking the right lens for more distant vision and the left lens for close-up work.

And of course it was the left iris that harbored what Stephen King calls the “devil’s spot,” a red blotch of pigment against the faded blue-grey.

The new floater was prominent, annoyingly close to the center of vision on that side. Otherwise, it behaved like all the other little ghostly floaters we’ve all had since childhood--you move your eyeball in any direction, and a miniscule ghostly crew swirls the same way, sometimes drifting along for a beat or two after your eye stops, catching their collective breath before you move your eye again and they have to head off in some other direction, with just that instant’s hesitation, like those folks in the audience who are always slow to get the joke.

Somehow, my eye doctors had overlooked giving me the “new floater” lecture, which they really ought to have done, particularly given the degree of my nearsightedness. So, while the new floater caused some mild concern, it was a matter of more-fun-fricking-aspects-of-aging, rather than drop-everything-and-call-the-medics-now.

So Celia and I ferried over to a friend’s island cabin for the long weekend and helped build a bonfire to consume some rotting old stumps someone had shoved downhill onto their property. The bonfire became an occasion to practice my annual fire-jumping routine for the upcoming mountaineer’s barbeque: as I ran up a log ramp to launch through the six-foot pyre, I tripped--dang--and had to convert my graceful leap into a racing dive, just barely managing to sprawl on the far side of the fire instead of face-planting directly into the flames.

The next Friday night we drove in the opposite direction, meeting up with Balls and similarly-grizzled types over in the Teanaway drainage to instruct novice climbers in rock and ice ax techniques in realistic terrain. Saturday’s instruction went well; our little group of students summitted Volcanic Neck, the most challenging of the peaks in our practice area.

Saturday night was the big BBQ. As I was changing out of my climbing clothes and boots, and rummaging in the cooler for some cider, I did notice an odd little area of obstructed sight the size of a fingernail paring at the very bottom of my left visual field, like a single tear waiting to fall. I brushed at the “tear” a couple of times without result, but I felt no pain or discomfort and anyway I was soon distracted by all the rowdy shenanigans of the BBQ: the fading daylight and the first few reluctant stars, the smoke and sparks of the cook-fire, the camaraderie and, of course, the drunken fire-jumping. I was looking to retire my “act,” so it was gratifying when four or five other hardy souls followed me through the flames. We had a couple of sprawls and close calls and one fellow who simply shuffled straight through the coals, too fast for the flames to grasp.

Sunday morning, we started back over the pass fairly early; Celia was scheduled to attend an afternoon wedding shower. The obscured area of vision had grown larger, but I was still able to drive, and I was still in denial, hoping that whatever this was, it might still vanish as quietly and painlessly as it had appeared. We were back in town, and I was unpacked and done with my weekend chores, by noon and my intentions were simple--to settle down in the front-porch sunshine for a perusal of the funny papers. But this weird visual impairment was becoming more difficult to ignore: if I held my closed hand a foot or so away and middle-low on my left, I couldn’t see my fingers behind a grey-brown veil. If I opened my hand up, I could see the tips of my fingertips, but none of the rest of my hand. What the heck, before diving into the Sunday paper, I decided to call the free nurse-line sponsored by my medical insurance plan. I described the situation--by this time having concluded that the new floater perhaps belonged in the sequence somehow--and the R.N. told me to get down to the nearest ER, pronto.

By shortly after one, the ER doc had referred me along to the “on-call” ophthalmologist, which required a drive to another medical facility across town. With one round of eye-blurring drops behind me, more in prospect, and with even less vision in my left eye, I had gotten a message to Celia at her shower that I might need her help with driving in the near future. We almost met up at the eye-doc’s, and she actually beat me to the next destination, the on-call retinal specialist’s office up at the north end of town. We arrived shortly before the doctor did and finally got a definitive diagnosis--the new floater had been a subtle sign of retinal tearing, perhaps a thin thread of capillary blood--and the swelling lobe of non-sight was a much more obvious manifestation of a retinal detachment (which, if untreated, quickly leads to irreversible blindness). The retina is stretched more thinly inside the elongated eyeball of the very nearsighted and a thinner retina is more prone to tearing in response to otherwise innocuous age-related changes. I had lost my lower vision first due to the camera reversal effect: the retina had torn and detached on the upper rear of the eye, draping down, blocking more and more of my vision as the “curtain” continued to fall.

So that’s why I acquired this entertaining bubble in my eyeball. By the next evening, the earliest eye-surgery could be scheduled, I could see in a slender crescent across the very top of my left visual field. At five that Monday night, I was wheeled into the OR for vitrescopy surgery, and placed under general anesthesia. Two hours later, I was waking up in recovery, woozily eavesdropping on to the dissociated chatter of the attendants. The gas bubble had been injected into the liquid vitreous of the eyeball using miniature microscopic instruments the surgeon had inserted through tiny apertures in the white sclera. The gas bubble plastered my peeling retina back up against the inner curve of my eyeball, which allowed the surgeon to fire a laser in through my lens and neatly repair the tears. This was the less-invasive surgical alternative, “moving the wallpaper to the wall.” I was able to avoid the less pleasant, more-traumatic option of “moving the wall to the wallpaper” by means of a scleral buckle, girth-hitching a band of material around a semi-eviscerated eyeball, altering the anatomy at the back of my eye just enough to smooth out the wayward fold of retina.

The first night in the hospital was “uncomfortable”--the surface of my eye had been roughed up that hurt each time it scraped against the lid, like having an eyeful of grit. To keep the repair in place, and to avoid depriving the cornea of its internal fluid bath, the gas bubble needed to be nudged into the top rear of the eyeball, which meant I had to try to sleep with my bandaged face shoved down into a horseshoe-shaped pillow (picture a massage table). The pillow tugged against the bandage, which tugged against the lid, which hurt. This was my first surgery, and my first overnight stay in a hospital, so it was a learning experience: the nurses do their best, but they don’t come when they’re called, and they don’t give you nearly the quantity or quality of drugs you’d like. I had to negotiate for several hours to get a sleeping pill. Much of that time was spent huddled elbow to knee on the bed, with my forehead jammed into my fists.

After finally getting some sleep, morning was a considerable relief, and the bubble and I were able to begin our acquaintance in relative comfort. The doctor examined me that same morning, and again that Friday, and again last Friday. Keeping the bubble properly positioned was the main task of that first two-week period--looking down as much as possible, no gazing out into space, and no sleeping face up. I’ve been able to read a paperback, but looking up at the top of the page of a larger book or a newspaper, or across at a TV, computer, or movie screen, was strongly discouraged. That edict was finally lifted last Friday and on Saturday I took myself to the multiplex for a dose of Brad and Angelina: Mr. and Mrs. Bubblehead!

I can drive for short distances. The bubble should be gone in a week or two, and then I can return to altitude. No strenuous physical activity (of the grunting, eyeball-pressuring sort) for another three to four weeks, until the scarring of my sclera is healed. “Full” vision may not be back for an amorphous term of several weeks to a couple of months: in any event, until the eye has settled down, there’s no way to obtain a new correction, so until I’ll be effectively functioning with “good” vision only on the right side. So now I’ve reached that frustrating manageable-nuisance phase or, as my hypothetical A-bomb observer might have said, Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

On the other hand, a little over two weeks ago I was going quietly blind in my left eye. From that perspective, this tiny bubble is my new best friend.


-- Submitted by Steviepinhead