PARTIAL DETACHMENT | Davida Pines
Speaking the name of each method feels like uttering an incantation. Or delivering a curse. I imagine myself raising a wand and shouting:
“Pneumatic Retinopexy!”
Pneumatic is easy to say. I think of pneumonia. Or pneumatic brakes.
Retinopexy comes out garbled. I expect it to roll out smoothly, all in one go, the way colonoscopy does. Instead, I get stuck on the “puh” between the “op “and the “pex.” What you have to do is let the word dance, allow for syncopation—three beats to two. ONE-two-three / ONE-two. RE-tin-oh / PEX-ie. It takes practice.
***
When I was a child, my father, a physician, had certain pet peeves when it came to language. No matter how breathlessly, joyously, I might have been narrating a tale of mistaken identities—“She didn’t even recognize him!”—he would stop me mid-sentence.
“The word,” he would say slowly, “is reh-COG-nize.” He enunciated each syllable, exaggerating the hard “g.” “Not ‘reh-CAH-nize.’”
“Okay, okay.” I would wave this lesson away, trying hard to maintain the momentum of my narration. “So, she completely didn’t recognize—”
“Reh-COG-nize,” he would stop me again. There was no going on until I got it right.
***
I attend similarly, now, to the sounds in “Scleral Buckle,” the second possible method. When I speak these words aloud, they clog the back of my throat. I wonder if the person who coined this term noticed how the opening “kl” in “sclera” returns in the closing “kl” in “buckle.” When I separate the words into their constituent sounds, the effect is like beat boxing: Sss-Kk-Lll; Buh-Kuh-Lll. Hard sounds notwithstanding, the sclera refers not to anything sharp or brittle, but rather to the soft white tissue that surrounds the eye. ‘Buckle’ nonsensically brings my mother-in-law’s blueberry buckle to mind. Refocusing, I consider whether the procedure might somehow involve a cinching or fastening of that soft, protective tissue.
***
In its uncanny mingling of hard and soft, the language of retina repair reminds me of my father. Flopped on my belly across my bed or curled into the green corduroy chair in the corner of my childhood room, I would, on certain Sunday nights, hear my name bellowing up through the floorboards. It was my signal to come running. I would drop whatever favorite book I was rereading, leap to my feet, tear down the hallway, and fling myself down the stairs three at a time. Flying at top speed around the corner and into the den, I would catapult myself at my father who would be splayed out on the couch, arms flung wide, waiting for me to hurl myself in for a hug.
Sometimes, when I wasn’t sure if I had really heard the call, I would cock my head sideways and sit very still, listening for another muffled blast. If it did come again, I scrambled up and charged down the hall, trying to make up for lost time. Inevitably, when I arrived in the den my father would be looking at his watch and shaking his head. “You’re late,” he would say. “I’m afraid you missed the hug.” And then I would stomp my foot and protest that it wasn’t fair until he relented, folding me into his arms.
***
Retina repair method three is “Vitrectomy.” On hearing the word for the first time I hone in on the neat cut of the “k.” Did anyone else notice the way all three methods were united by the hard “k” sound, from the “eks” in retinoPEXy to the “sk” in SClera to the “ect” in vitrECTomy? Had linking these sounds from one word to the next been deliberate? Was the hard “k” in some way connected to the exacting nature of the surgery?
“Ectomy” is easy enough to understand: a removal or excision. I think of “lump-ectomy.” The “vit” or “vit-reh” does not mean anything to me at first, but then “vitreous” comes to mind. Or is it “vitreous humor”? I recognize the term from 10th grade biology when I spent hours studying the diagram of an eye. The whole eye unit had unnerved me. I had been terrified by those episodes on Little House on the Prairie when Mary Ingalls slowly went blind following a bout of Scarlet Fever. And for months after an elementary school screening of The Miracle Worker, I worried that my own eyesight might be failing as young Helen’s had. My father was impatient with irrational fears. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
***
When a partial retinal detachment—that is, a small tear—occurred in my father’s right eye last March, it seemed that the other shoe had finally dropped. He had lost central vision in his left eye more than ten years earlier. Dementia complicated the situation. Leave the room for a moment, and my father will forget that you have been there at all. Bring him up to date on your life and your children, and seconds later he will ask what is new. Tell him that he is scheduled for retina surgery, and that recovery, which is not guaranteed, will involve two weeks of “face-down” positioning and up to ten weeks of fully obscured vision, and he will fall into existential despair. Seek to reassure him during the most confusing days of the long recovery and meet his outrage. “Nothing about this is all right,” he will snap. “I cannot see, and no one’s got the vaguest idea what is going on.” Just his luck to be surrounded by fools in his moment of need.
***
Perhaps the most exacting standard that my father held my brother and me to when we were growing up was the truth. If he happened upon something in the house that had been mysteriously broken—say, a plate glued inexpertly back together, or a decorative glass bowl arranged carefully so as to conceal an underlying crack —he would assemble us sternly before him.
“Would someone like to explain what happened here?” he would ask, his eyes pinning us.
“Umm—"
“Exactly when were you planning on telling me about this?”
It was the cover-up, not the accident, that bothered him.
“I will not put up with liars,” he would announce. “Go to your rooms.”
***
Dementia, it turns out, puts a strain on the truth. Early on in his diagnosis, when he could still grasp what was happening to him, my father would snap at my mother when she tried to remain upbeat in the face of his losses. “My brain is disintegrating and there is not a damned thing anyone can do about it.”
Still, three years after his diagnosis and no longer aware of his own condition, he works diligently at the activities that help keep his brain from disintegrating further, or at least faster. It is as if he cannot help doing what needs to be done.
“Art therapist?” he will say scornfully when my mother tells him Mikala has arrived for his weekly lesson. “I don’t have an art therapist.”
In the beginning, Mikala guided my father through some open-ended exercises. She had him experiment with color and line, and he dutifully produced a few expressionistic pieces. It was when she offered him a pencil and sketchpad, however, and brought him portraits to copy, that something shifted. My father’s drawings were startling not only in the skill that they revealed but also in the precision and nuance of his reproductions. Who knew he could do this, too?
Still, if you sit with him and flip through his by-now quite expansive collection of work, he will study the images quizzically.
“I made these?” he will ask, not only disbelieving but also unimpressed.
Most of all, he can’t understand why he would have done any of these pieces in the first place. Drawing and painting had never been part of his adult life. Why on earth would they be now?
***
“Something terrible has happened to me,” my father announced over and over in the days and weeks after his surgery. “I am blind.”
“It is only temporary,” I would reply, working hard to keep my voice calm and measured.
“Why is it temporary?”
“Because you are recovering from surgery.”
“Surgery? I didn’t have surgery.”
Walking the line between offering information and contradicting him, I would say as matter-of-factly as I could, “You had retina surgery.”
“Retina surgery? What happened to my retina?”
“You had a small tear.”
“Did I lose vision in that eye?”
“No,” I would say, eager to give him good news.
“Well, then how was it discovered?”
“You went in for a regular six-month checkup and the eye doctor happened to find it.”
“So, it was a spontaneous detachment discovered during a routine eye exam,” he summarized neatly. I stored away the correct words for the next time.
“And then what happened?” he pressed.
After a while, the answers no longer made sense to him. Laser surgery? A gas bubble?
“I don’t understand any of this,” he would say, turning away in disgust. I knew better than to bring up Vitrectomy.
“All I know is that I can’t see, and it is very scary.”
***
When it was all over, of course, my father remembered nothing. Not the trauma, not the miracle of sight returning.
“Isn’t it wonderful that you can read that sign?” my mother said one day as we were driving back from the last of the follow-up appointments. They were nearly through the worst of it.
“Why wouldn’t I be able to read that sign?” my father asked with some impatience.
“Because you haven’t been able to see anything for almost two months.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s true,” I said. “You had retina surgery.”
“Retina surgery? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Davida Pines is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Associate Dean of Faculty Research at Boston University's College of General Studies. She has written a book called The Marriage Paradox, as well as numerous articles on comics and graphic medicine. Most recently, her research focuses on graphic memoirs on Alzheimer's Disease.