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Aargh, a Pirate Look for Me

When people encounter me on the street (which is not often, since the street is such an iffy place for meeting people) or at certain social functions, such as the recent delightful Lady Fingers Art and Craft Show, where I was signing copies of my book, they could not help but notice that I was wearing an eye patch over my left eye.

Aargh. Shiver me timbers, matey.

Properly, it is not an eye patch but an eye shield. It is made of clear plastic, and features a ring of foam rubber (the “moisture barrier”) around the edges. It is held in place with a thin elastic string stretched around the back of my head, such as secured the Lone Ranger masks of my youth.

My left eye can see perfectly well through the eye shield, except when it is fogged up, which is most of the time, and then what it sees is a foggy day in London town. This confuses my unobstructed right eye, which perceives a bright and sunny day. “Binocular confusion” is the name I would give this condition, and write a paper on it, if I were an ambitious oculist given to naming conditions in hopes of advancing my career.

But I am not. Not an oculist and not ambitious.

PEOPLE HAVE different reactions to my eye shield.

Some politely ignore it since obviously it is a medical appliance, and they do not wish to pry into my personal medical issues.

Then there are the people who ask “Where’s your parrot?” The first time I heard that one, it took me a moment to catch the pirate reference. Aargh.

Most reactions fall somewhere in-between.

If it is a person who knows I had brain surgery, he or she asks kindly, “How are you doing?”

If somehow they missed that fact – which is amazing since I was on 20 prayer chains in five states, God knows how many Facebook pages, and wrote four newspaper columns about it – they ask what’s up with the eye patch.

Either reaction is OK, because it gives me an opening to tell them the whole story of my brain tumor: the double vision that alerted us to a problem, the MRI that disclosed an acoustic neuroma tumor, the 11-hour brain surgery, my miraculous recovery, the post-op complication of Bell’s palsy, my miraculous recovery from that, and the lingering symptom of dry eye, which I manage with eyedrops and the astutely observed clear plastic eye shield.

Like the wedding guest waylaid by the Ancient Mariner telling his tale, I “hold them with my glittering eye” (the right one) until the tale is told, unless they are clever enough to feign a coughing fit or stroke and hasten away.

The Ancient Mariner poem, by the way, has nothing to do with piracy, but it is nautical.

SOMETIMES PEOPLE (and by “people” I mean “women”) are thoroughly up to speed with my brain surgery, palsy, dry eye, everything, because they have been chatted up regularly on the subject by my wife, my sisters, my daughter, or my daughter-in-law Miss T, the latter as they sat in a dental chair and she cleaned their teeth.

Miss T is acquainted with the teeth of everyone in town worth knowing, judging by the number of people who begin conversations with me by saying, “Your daughter-in-law was cleaning my teeth and she told me….”

Don’t get the idea that I mind the women in my life talking about me or my brain surgery. When I was first diagnosed, I told Honey, “Keep this to yourself. I don’t want everyone feeling sorry for me.”

Ha. That lasted about two minutes. Soon I was telling my story to strangers at the next gas pump and showing them the surgical scar behind my ear.

The darned thing is, they usually have their own boring medical odysseys to relate in reply. I have heard more tales of hernia repairs, hip replacements and melanoma excavations than you can shake a scalpel at. They unbutton their shirts and show me the ugly purple scars running the length of their sternums from their triple bypass operations.

Aargh! It’s enough to put a pirate off his grog.

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