ASHEVILLE EYE AND FAITH
Today I went to Asheville Eye Associates—Retina. Over a month ago I made an appointment at Asheville Eye Associates to see the doctor who replaced my cataracts several years ago becasue I thought that I couldn’t see close up quite as well as I did a year or two ago. Asheville Eye Associates is a large building with a large number of eye doctors with four women at the the front admitting you and then a large waiting room as well as a large fitting room where people can get new glasses. My old doctor had vanished and I had a new doctor. If I needed a new prescription I wasn’t going to get my glasses here, I was going to get them at one third the price from Bon Ton Opticians in a little shop on Connaught Place in New Delhi, where I’ve been getting glasses for the last twenty years. They recognize me at Bon Ton where the fitters of glasses stand behind a glass counter in the small fitting room open to the traffic of Connaught Place and offer me a cup of tea while I wait. They do the eye exam and prescription upstairs in a small office. It takes about five minutes for the prescription and then I go downstairs and select my glasses. I think the frames are all made outside India, probably in China by the same people who provide the frames to Asheville Eye Associates at three times the price. Bon Ton has a number of offices around Delhi and in other parts of India, but none of them are as large and imposing as Asheville Eye Associates. This is where I had my cataracts replaced a few years ago in an operating room where the doctor did maybe ten cataract operations a day.
Once in India I had attended an cataract clinic where a line of villagers sat on the porch in a line in chairs and then entered one by one and lay down on a table in an empty school room and had their cataracts replaced under an ordinary house lamp and then went outside and sat in another line for an hour and then were given drops to be administered and walked home. I think the doctors did 50 or 100 operations a day with no bad results.
At Asheville Eye each doctor has a number of offices, each with advanced equipment. And patients are taken into a room and prepared by young women assistants who do most of the work and then the doctor goes from room to room making a final assessment. Instead of checking my eyes for a new prescription the young woman who prepared me had me read a chart with one eye and then the other, said my eyes were fine, and said all I needed was new drug store reading glasses to see slightly better close up. Then she had me look into a machine that let her see deep into my eye and take blinding pictures of my retina on each side.
Then the doctor came in and looked deep into my eyes and said that there was some bleeding in one eye and that I should visit a retina specialist.
So today I visited the retina specialist. I’d never heard of a retina specialist before and was amazed to find out that there are not only retina specialists but specialists for other parts of the eye as well. And when I got to the building that housed the retina specialists it was as grand and as large as the first first building, a whole building of eye doctors looking at the retina and nothing else. This was certainly not
Bon Ton Opticians.
Again I was sent from from office to office with one woman assistant checking one thing and another checking something else until Dr. Komanski came in, appearing awfully young to me, but at 85 who am I to judge. He looked into my right eye and dictated to the young women who had come in with him his judgment in scientese which was as foreign to me as Arabic had been last week in Morocco and then finally turned to me and said that I had two choices. I could come in in a month and see if their had been any changes and presumably come in month by month to be checked on or I could be treated right now. I said I was going to India in a couple of months for several months and he told me that I didn’t want to suddenly discover in India that I was losing my sight and that I needed to be treated immediately.
It turns out that below the retina I was leaking a little blood that was accumulating, not because of diabetes, which I have, or macular degeneration, which I don’t have, but because of old age and bad luck. This bleeding might stop on its own or it might put pressure on the retina that meant that I would begin to lose sight in that eye or, in the worst case, cause me to lose sight completely. His advice was to get a shot into my eyeball immediately and then to come back for the next two months and get another shot and then I would be fine to go to India. A shot in the eyeball didn’t phase him and he seemed surprised that it would bother me. He gave 40 or 50 shots a day into people’s eyeballs.
I said that I hadn’t understood what he had told his assistant, that I had no way to make a judgment and that I could only treat him as if he was God. Faith alone was all I could use to make a judgment. He agreed that I was operating by faith, but while I couldn’t see God and had to take him on faith, he could show me pictures of my optic nerve and retina and that I wasn’t deciding blindly, so to speak.
So I got the shot. But first another young woman put numbing drops into my eye and a numbing q tip into my lower eyelid. I told her that I still had questions and she told me to ask her because when Dr. Komanski reappeared he would only be there for ten seconds to give me the shot and then he’d be gone. How else could he give 40 or 50 shots a day? So I did, having faith in her, Dr. Komanski and God all at the same time.
I was a little reluctant because when Kathe had her first cataract taken out her eye had become infected a week later and when we called in to say she was having trouble seeing from that eye the assistant we talked with said to come in at the first free appointment in two weeks. When the next day Kathe couldn’t see at all and we called in the doctor on call was so rushed that he couldn’t take her to the hospital operating room where he would normally give her an antibiotic shot in her eyes and did it right there, quite painfully, in his office. Dr. Komanski said that a cataract operation had a one in 500 chance of becoming infected, but the shot he was giving me with a much smaller needle was only one in 5000. So now, five hours later I am sitting at home, my eye, which was scratchy, feels fine, and I have complete faith in the young woman, Dr. Komanski, God and the grand Asheville Eye Associates—-Retina.
If I go to Bon Ton Opticians on Connaught Place it will be only to get my prescription filled for new, inexpensive glasses.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 