Vitreous Humor

My vitreous humor has created a cedilla. At first I found it alarming, especially because it was accompanied by bright jagged lightning bolts, but the ophthalmologist told me to think of it as my new pet.

Don’t you love the way the beginning of ophthalmologist is spelled, with the pee-aitch pasted right next to the tee-aitch? That rare-as-a-tasty-okra-dish double consonant blend, unpronounceable to even—who was the actress with the distractingly exquisite diction who played Lady Danbury on Bridgerton? Adjoa Andoh. I also am enchanted by the surprise el at the end of the first second syllable of ophthalmologist, nearly silent, like the secret el in Ho(l)mily.

I have a suspicion about why my ophthalmologist chose to be one. He has a five-syllable Persian surname, and as he relayed with annoyance, no one bothers to learn how to pronounce it, or even try. They call him Dr. N. I think Dr. N, back when he was Mr. N, looked at the list of medical specialties and picked the least pronounceable one. Possibly in protest. Maybe in sympathy. Very few people learn to pronounce or spell ophthalmologist either. Either we butcher the pronunciation to something like optimologist, or we give up entirely and say eye doctor.

Luckily proctologist is easier to pronounce. Ditto gynecologist.

The cedilla appeared last Tuesday, seven thirty pee-em. I was leaving a zoom meeting and going downstairs to watch Grantchester with Beau.

--> Recommend! Handsome-grizzled copper teams up with handsome-youthful vicar to solve murders in England in 1953. Amazon Prime.

On my way to Grantchester, yikes! Donner and Blitzen (minus the Donner)! Not the reindeer, silly, but thunder and lightning, minus the thunder. I thought there a was a spider on the inside of my glasses, just inside the right hinge on the lens. Then more Blitzen, whoa! I swatted at the spider that wasn’t there. What the Dickens, as the housekeeper on Grantchester would say.

Then the Blitzen subsided and there was Cedilla. It wasn’t a spider at all, but a lightly rendered cedilla-shaped doodad, floating around in my eye. Cedilla moved horizontally when I moved my eyes horizontally, lagging just a bit and stretching springily as she merrily bounced back and forth. She leapt vertically when I moved my eyes vertically. She was off-center, up and to the right just a little, so at first it was hard to determine her shape exactly.

The next day, I looked at a blank white wall, prevalent in this house of ours, which is artlessly decorated. Then I saw her clearly, even though I can't look directly at her because she darts away.

She’s shaped like a cedilla, I told Dr. N. He looked at me, uncomprehending. I said, You know---that little squiggle that you put under a cee that occurs in the middle of a French word, to indicate that the cee is a soft cee, an ess sound.

I drew a sketch of her on my phone for Dr. N, since unlike me, he must not have taken a year of French in ninth grade, back when I retained information for more than a microsecond.

At the end of the year, our class took a bus trip to New York City to go to a French restaurant, since we didn't have anything other than Yocco's and iHop in eastern Pennsylvania. The waiter said to me, Est-ce que la soupe est bonne?

Google Translate says that means, Is it that your soup could be a chocolate treat? Rate this translation.

I think it’s funny that the French word for cedilla is la cédille. The cee doesn’t have a cedilla, and there’s an accent aigu on the first eee. It’s like those dementia tests they give you, where you have to read the name of a color that’s written in a different color text, not that I would know anything at all about those. I think the word la cédille is a little joke, courtesy of the French people, and in my opinion, it’s much funnier than Jerry Lewis.

Dr. N put some drops into my eyes to dilate them, and said the dilation would take about thirty minutes.

Now at this point, in my experience, the doctor will go to another room to take care of other patients or catch up on some paperwork. They might come back to check on you once, but generally they’re gone for half an hour or so.

Heck, I was prepared for Dr. N to be gone for a full hour. Like a lot of health facilities, Kaiser has been hit hard by staff shortages from omicron infections. Stupid Covid.

But Dr. N hung out with me the whole thirty minutes. First he told me about his own eye problems that, like mine, involved flashing lights, but also blurry and tunnel vision, unlike mine. I am pretty sure he wanted to convince me that his were worse. I am happy to lose any competition of whose health problems are worse than whomse.

Sidebar: To my English-second-language readers, don’t look up whomse. It’s not a real word. I made it up to riff on the accusative case of whose, which is not a thing. End of sidebar.

When we’d finished with Dr. N’s eye problems, we moved on to a lecture about patients who don’t obey his order to not look at their phones while their pupils are dilating. I learned that continuing to focus while waiting for the chemistry to do its bit is counterproductive. I said, I’ll put my phone in my bag. To show I was serious, I opened my bag, inserted my phone, and zipped that bag shut with a convincing flourish. I thought he would leave then, once he realized I would be a model patient, but he didn’t.

Instead he told me about teaching ophthalmology at Cal, how medical students these days (including ophthalmology students!) can’t stop looking at their phones, even when they’re talking to patients. Dr. N think it’s a form of addiction. And it's rude, doggone disrespectful. He’s worried about his young children, aged eight and eleven. I’m worried about them, too, for several reasons.

After a good thirty minutes of lecturing about poorly behaved patients, students and children, Dr. N pronounced my pupils dilated, and he examined my retinas, both of them.

I know it’s in my right eye, I said, because he was moving on to my left eye.

Dr. N said, A lot of patients think it’s in one eye, and then I find it in the other.

When I close my right eye, it goes away, I said.

He was silent, no doubt impressed by my command of the scientific method.

He found the culprit. In my right eye. It’s a Weiss Ring, he said. It's the second most common type of posterior vitreous detachment.

I felt just a little bad for not asking him what the most common kind is.

The Weiss Ring is named after the scientist who discovered it, he said. A German, he continued, as if I wouldn't recognize weiss as a German word. I'd taken German second period in ninth grade, across the hall from French, first period. I'd learned all my color words, from weiss to schwarz. The German teacher, Herr Wagner, had nerve damage in his left hand, and if someone got an answer wrong, he'd slam his hand on the student's desk and scream, Ente Suppe!

Google Translate says, No supper for you! Rate this translation.

Dr. N added, Scientists with German or English names have their discoveries named after them. If a scientist had a Persian name, I am sure they wouldn’t name it after him.

That’s probably the reason Dr. N didn’t have a disorder named after him. What would be the point of even bothering to do the research, am I right?

Also, he'd referred to the researcher as him. I feel like Persian women could also discover something and have it not named after them. But I just shook my head sympathetically, watching the cedilla bounce back and forth.

Think of it as your new pet, said Dr. N. It will be with you for a long time, and you’ll get used to it. A normal consequence of age, he said.

He told me not to worry, just watch out for additional symptoms like a big snowstorm, more lightning, or a descending cloud layer that covers the sky and doesn’t move around. In short, inclement eye weather of any sort.

If you see any of those, he said, make an appointment the same week. You don’t even have to ask for me, but you can if you want to. He gave me an insert for my glasses to help me tolerate my dilated pupils tolerate the bright lights on the drive home.

As I said goodbye, I wished I had been able to sneak a peek at the Kaiser app on my phone, so that I could at least attempt to pronounce his name. It would probably have made his day.

Meanwhile I have a new pet, whom I’ve named Cedilla. She has her own jingle, M-M-M-My Cedilla. You’re welcome.

[Above, found photo of Weiss Ring. Below, my sketch of Cedilla, as shown to Dr. N.]