And Your Eyes Like Smoke And Your Prayers Like Rhymes

I think I may have been lobotomized. Or perhaps not. You can see how it would be: if a portion of my frontal lobe has been disrupted or destroyed, my ability to reason, to draw conclusions, is likely compromised. Am I seeing the world as it is, or is my perception skewed? Am I alarmed over insignificant things or sanguine about truly deadly threats? Is my concern about my possible lobotomization a symptom of the insanity that provoked my wife into signing the permission, or of the damage done to me by the filthy-fingered butcher of a back-alley lowest-bidding, quack, defrocked, disbarred, excommunicated, unlicensed, retired-VA psychosurgeon abortionist she hired to do the job?

Does President Bush ever wonder these things about himself? Nookuler! I'll bet the bastards used nook u ler devices on me! Prob'ly got `em from one o' them Enemy of America, Axis of Evil countries.

Well, here's what I thought happened until I thought about it some more a week or so after it all happened, as I was sitting here holding my aching head and feeling sorry for myself. You'll remember my sprightly and fascinating essay of last autumn concerning my retinal detachment that I had repaired with a procedure called a pneumatic retinopexy. From the reaction to that column I now understand that most persons do not like to hear stories of one's personal experience with needles introduced into the interior of the eye, which is too bad, because it cost me five thousand, seven hundred and ten dollars to enjoy that episode (plus some lost wages), and I'd like to think I got a good story out of it. On the other hand, I can make at least one over-anxious, micro-managing customer flee the jobsite just by hinting that I'm about to get out my bloody eye socket pictures (ask me if you're interested in seeing them, please).

So the fix worked. Then, just a few days into the new year, the same retina ripped loose in a different place. So, Dr. Bazarian convinced me, we needed to do a more comprehensive job. Thus, on the eighth of January I submitted to a vitrectomy and a scleral buckle. Vitrectomy : a surgical procedure by which the gelatinous content of the eyeball

is removed and replaced by a large bubble of gas designed to hold the retina in place while the laser wounds made to paste it into its bed fuse and heal. Scleral buckle : a band placed around the eyeball and sutured into its surface (the sclera) to squeeze the orb in such a way as to permanently pressure the retina to behave.

So I lay on a table, suffered an intravenous tube to be driven into me through which God may know what chemicals might have been infused. Then I was gassed. When I awakened, over two hours later, I was sent home to recover. I can see the gas bubble, and what vision I have around its edges is more myopic than previously, so I can infer that I have the buckle as well (an eyeball made more elongated by lateral constriction will be an eye more nearsighted). If I look at my feet for several weeks, keeping my lens wet while the gas is absorbed and replaced with new fluid, I have a long-shot chance of escaping a cataract (and further surgery and expense) within a year.

And speaking of expense. The bill from my surgeon hasn't arrived yet, but let's guess five grand, shall we? The anaesthesiologist got his invoice to me within days: $1,344. Maine Medical Center, which entertained me at its Scarborough Surgery Center, is asking that I remit $6,672. So the second operation (holding together so far) totals about thirteen thousand. The first (good as far as it went, but not, apparently, comprehensive enough), was fifty-seven hundred. Altogether, to preserve vision in my right eye (and the attendant virtues, in concert with its fellow, of depth-perception and binocularity and redundancy), will, if I am ever able to pay the whole of it off, set me back about nineteen thousand.

Well, that's how it goes. Or I could have sent thousands to some insurance company each year for the last several decades, put up with their paperwork, and still be looking at some ridiculous "co-pay." But let me suggest if you ever need a three and a half gram bottle of TobraDex Opthalmic Suspension you not allow Maine Medical Center supply you. Three hundred, sixteen dollars . A host of online pharmacies sell it for thirty-odd bucks. Except for one from Canada that offers it for eighteen dollars. Except theirs is a seven gram bottle, which means the volume I took home would have cost me only nine dollars , which I suspect is about what it's worth, and does not require some poor Canadian pharmacist to freeze or starve for lack of income.

Did I mention that the cheap plastic sunglasses (which I did not ask for, but are part of the package deal they give you after they put you to sleep), were a mere thirty-seven, fifty?

So, yes, I did get my eye fixed. And should your retina tear loose, I recommend either or both of the operations I tried. They hurt some, but not as much as some of the things I've done to myself. Recovery is interesting, to a degree, if tedious. Be sure to take several close-up photographs, particularly if your surgeon ruptures some capillaries as he inserts one or more of the three pipes that penetrate your eyeball and you get a hideous-looking (although not painful or serious) conjunctival hemorrhage. There is great satisfaction in alarming the squeamish.

But was I lobotomized? Have you ever seen pictures of the patients (victims) of Dr. Walter Freeman, inventor and popularizer of the bilateral transorbital prefrontal lobotomy? As crazy old Doc Freeman hammered his ice-picks through their skulls behind their eyeballs, they looked, upon the gurney, just as I must have appeared to the persons in the operating room who had not been deprived of consciousness.

This much I do know: I have required an uncharacteristic amount of sleep these last three weeks; I have felt lethargic, overcome by a lassitude and passivity; I have not been much concerned by the mountain of bills accumulated on my desk, nor motivated to work and earn money to pay them. I am calmed, unthreatening. I watched W's State Of The Union speech tonight, together with the press blather surrounding it, and uttered my usual obscenities only in the most desultory fashion. Maybe some of you will find this new personality more to your liking than my old one.

My friend Herman tells me that fighting pain takes a great deal of energy. As he is in so many things, I believe he is right about this. I may yet regain my familiar bite. But Herman has been supplying me with coffee and conversation in my convalescence, and the road commissioner has told me if I need food or firewood, wild game or women, I need only ask and he will rally the fire company to provide.

And another resident of our quirky little upriver rural community told me one day at the post office that I should read a book, No Great Mi s chief by Alistair Macleod, a copy of which she provided and which I read with my left eye and what remains of my cortex.

It's a remarkable book. You should read it too. I do not think as you do, probably, do not vote as you do, and I have learned enough about myself to know where my interests and passions and fancies and fears diverge from the common flow. But I believe that some fundamental facts of the human experience I can better express or perhaps I am only more willing to express than your typical local columnist. People tell me this is so, and many of their letters are written late at night and speak of wounds and losses that make my little poke-in-the-eye tale an amusement ride.

Just before I went to sleep and woke up in my present condition a woman asked me how I dealt with the increasing ruin of the body that age brings to us all. I am late in answering her, but my answer is that pain and disfigurement is of no concern so long as curiosity and purpose and loneliness may be held at bay. When Herman says I have outworn my welcome and there will be no more coffee, I shall have lived too long. Until then, we happily drag our crippled limbs over rough ground, doing as we can with what we can bring to the struggle, and glad of the opportunity of a new day and the provision of several of our important organs in pairs, lest one should fail.

It's right there on page 272 of No Great Mischief : "All of us are better when we're loved."

I've been away for a few weeks. I'm back until something else goes bad.