TRUST AND UNDERSTANDING
I went to Asheville Retinal Associates to get the second injection into my eyeball to protect me for a blood clot in the back of my right eye. This time I was a little calmer than I was the first time. The first time my knowledge that Kathe’s eyeball got infected after a cataract operation and she almost lost her sight in that eye made me reluctant and anxious about messing with my eyeball. But there were no ill effects the first time so I was calmer. For the assistant these shots were routine, 18 people today and on some days up to 50 people. Apparently this is a pretty common necessary procedure for old folks.
This time I asked some questions and I learned a lot, but not about my eye. What was the shot achieving? Was it stopping the oozing of blood, was it stopping an infection, was it dissolving the blood clot? The assistant, who agreed that her job was to numb my eyeball with a Q-tip dipped in numbing solution put under my lower eyelid where the shot would go in, but also to chit chat with me and distract me and keep me calm so that Dr. Komanski could say, “Look to your left,” and then slip the needle in without my noticing. But the assistant seemed to have free time to chit chat so I asked her my questions. She said the shot did a number of things and would both dissolve the clot and stop the bleeding, it wasn’t an antibiotic. But while she claimed to know just what the shot did she said that she couldn’t put it into words, that Dr. Komanski would have to tell me.
Bu when he came in he put it into words, slowly and as clearly as he could, I had no clue what he was talking about. It had something to do with a wandering molecule which caused the bleeding which was neutralized somehow by the injected medicine. He tried to make it simple but it didn’t work. He couldn’t do it because the only way he knew to describe it was in scientific medical school language.
That is what I learned from the visit and I thought about it on the way home.
The expert, the person who knows what he is talking about, the person I can trust can only explain what he is doing in medical terms and this is because there is a special precise language that had to be developed to in order to do precise science. You can’t do science with ordinary language. You have to make up a new language to do science precisely. That is why the assistant didn’t have the words but the words Dr. Komansky used while being the right words, were not understandable to me.
For me to understand science at all I have to read descriptions of science by people who can popularize science by putting it into ordinary language. It takes a special kind of writer to be able to do this. And even then, when it is put into my own everyday language I know that I am just trusting the writer who translates science for me because I am not able to really understand.
In fact, almost everything I have learned in school is based on trust in the people who write the textbooks and are translating history or philosophy or literature of science. It is all second hand. That is the only way that I can cover large subjects, someone has to summarize them for me.
That is what I learned at Asheville Retinal Associates today.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 