Eyes - Windows

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There's something in my eye. Not an eyelash or a speck of dust. This I can't feel or see. I discovered it by accident.

We got two new microscopes at school, ones that actually focus, that have a light built in instead of depending on smudgy mirrors and sunny days in order to see microscopic entities. The new microscopes inspired me to renew the search for micro-organisms in local ponds, despite the ice coverings and the apparent disappearance of all such creatures at this time of year.

Last week I was searching a slide I'd prepared, again finding nothing squiggly, only short dead strands of blue-green algae, boring. I was using the highest power, 400X, I think, and the cells were clear, luminous, but I wanted paramecia and amoeba, the vision of the battle of species in a world we can't see.

I don't know why I switched from my right eye to my left. Maybe I thought one eye would catch what the other missed. But switch I did, and instead of greater clarity, I saw a shadow. It was the shape of a rent in loose-woven cotton, like something had split open, frayed at the edges. I switched back to the right eye and all was clear. I checked in the other microscope - same thing.

I checked again the next day, thinking maybe it was a corneal scratch or a floater, and that it would have healed or changed or moved, but it was still there, the same.


I visit the ophthalmologist tomorrow. I wanted to write this tonight, in case this is the "before" of a bad diagnosis. I suppose it's universal to fear the worst when anomalies happen in one's body. The pain in the stomach becomes cancer; the strain in the chest, a heart attack; the headache, a stroke.


A student of mine, Julia, was having eye trouble a couple of years ago, when she was just seven and in Grade Two. She, with her mom, paid a visit to an optometrist in a shopping mall. He saw something, something not right, and sent them to the emergency ward, calling ahead to ensure they would be seen immediately. Within 48 hours, Julia had a tumour the size of a Mandarin orange removed from her brain.

She returned to school a few weeks later, with partly shaved head and a scar that looked like the curving stitches on a baseball. I talked with her a bit (I was the music teacher and went to visit her in her classroom,) and she told me she'd had five needles the day before. She said, "They told me it wouldn't hurt, but it did!"

Julia soon left for almost a year of rounds of chemotherapy. She returned last winter, wearing a pink bandanna, wisps of brown hair peeking out, hair that slowly grew thicker so that by the end of the school year she abandoned the bandanna and sported short but shiny waves.

At a check-up in the summer, it was found that the tumour had regrown. She's back in hospital most of the time, though she has dropped around the school a couple of times.

She's something of a celebrity: we've held fundraisers to help her family, and just this week every kid in every class in the school contributed to a giant Valentine's scrapbook to give to her. She's on TV in a one-minute advertising spot asking for support for Children's Hospital, saying, "I just want to go home." Again the pink bandanna, though the last couple of times I've seen her, her head's been bare, the few long strands of hair flaying out wildly. (Her "freak flag," I keep thinking, sensing there is something of that old David Crosby song in her, that she is fed up with pretending and covering up.) Recently, when she arrived at the school, someone in my class, which overlooks the entrance, spotted her, and instantly the whole class was at the windows, calling to her. It's quite moving, how these kids have attached themselves to her, how they care.


Julia's life changed with a visit to the eye doctor. I'm a wee bit worried.





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