My sad panda week

Sorry to be AWOL most of this year. This has been a week.

It started great by taking MLK Day off (no, I don’t get it off) in order to get some stuff done. Check. Mrs. Carpetbagger was off to Arizona with her niece, The Princess, visiting my parents. So I was “baching it” with the dog. Monday was fine. I thought I could afford it even though I am carefully managing my dwindling vacation/sick days for a trip we are taking in February.

Tuesday morning, I was up and out bright and early in order to tackle all the missed work, emails, and messages from my three-day weekend. Turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. Not a cough or sputter. Called Triple-A, hoping it was just battery but knowing that would be far too easy. Sure enough, the first dude checked the battery and generator and everything was fine. He suspected either the starter or a fuse that drove the starter. Well, we know it’s not going to be the fuse, don’t we? After the second Triple-A guy towed the car to my mechanic, I set off for Mrs. Carpetbagger’s car… Doh! Of course, it was at the airport. I really couldn’t take more time off this week and it was already 9:30am. I called Enterprise Rent-a-car because they pick you up. As I’m totaling up what all of this was going to cost me, I had a thought: Hey, if I can just get to the airport, I could get the other car! To pull this off would entail a) finding someone to take me to the airport at 9:30am on a Tuesday, and b) Mrs. Bagger answering her phone at 7:30am in Phoenix to tell me where it was located in extended parking. Eureka. Both points were solved on the first try, and I was soon going westward to the airport to get the car before going east to the office in Westmoreland County. Welcome to Tuesday.

Wednesday, I was trying to get a new contact lens to replace the one I had lost the previous week. No dice. I hadn’t been seen by the eye doc in two years. They weren’t going to write a prescription for a new lens without an exam. Doh! More time off. Of course, the 11:30am appointment lasted for three hours. And man, did they work me over. My eyes, as it turns out, are quite the medical phenomenon. After four different drops I was fully dilated, checked for glaucoma, and given a topography for my corneas (like the one on the left). Somewhere in my past, some doctor had pronounced that my eyes have what is called Keratoconus–corneas that are cone-shaped  instead of dome-shaped. Hard, gas-permeable contacts work well on this condition to provide a proper shape. One of the two doctors I saw on Wednesday disagreed.

This second doc was some sort of big whoop-de-doo eye specialist and surgeon who teaches at Pitt. This means that he is super smart but has lousy bed-side manners. He was staring into my eyes, shining lights at them, ordering me to move them around, and dictating notes to a furiously scribbling nurse/assistant/student. Words were being thrown around with no context. Words like thinning… degenerative…. pellucid. In my mind, of course, I’ve already decided that I’m going blind. Maybe a telethon can be held. Maybe my dog will learn to obediently lead me safely around. (Not likely. She’d get me killed on day one! “What do you mean cars aren’t made of marshmallows?”) Maybe I can develop a world-class music career like Stevie Wonder! Maybe my other senses will become so finely tuned that I will be able to solve crimes! Yeah, I can go that far that quickly. Finally, the doc decided to talk to me… you know, the patient, using normal words. He said that what I actually have is called Pellucid Marginal Degeneration.

Aw, that can’t be good, right?

It actually means that my corneas are weakened around the edges, causing the eye to be shaped like a beer-belly instead of like the Astrodome. See? It also turns out that one of the benefits of getting older is that by your forties, your eyes stiffen, pretty much like every other joint in the body. In this case, however, the stiffening tends to stop or significantly slow down the degeneration. Score one benefit for the aging process! Long story shot (too late!), it’s why I can’t see well; it’s why I see better with contacts than with glasses; and it’s why I’m not a candidate for Lasik surgery. The doc did tell me that there is a surgery for it but it’s not approved in the U.S. He said they have sent some patients to Toronto to have it done. What!? They send people to other countries for procedures that are not approved here? Is it done in the back of a van by a doctor who calls himself Carlos? It costs 5 to 12 grand per eye and they don’t take insurance. Yeah, uh, thanks, doc, but I think I’ll take my chances with the contacts.

After the three-hour torture session, my eyes were so dilated that I couldn’t see anything up close. I was able to drive to my office because I was fine for anything more than ten feet away. But reading… looking at a computer… just about anything I could hold in my hands… all of it looked like someone had pixelated it out. I don’t know what they put in my eyes but they really weren’t back to normal until late on Thursday.

Anyhoo… until my contacts arrive, I’m still sort of vision-challenged for reading and computers. Just doing this post is starting to give me a headache.

By this morning, the car is fixed and Mrs. Bagger is back. Now, anytime she asks me to do something unpleasant, I can just look at her with my sad panda face and say, “Did you forget that I have Pellucid Marginal Degeneration?” I plan to get out of doing tons of stuff!

And I’m contacting Bono, Rihanna, and Jay-Z to write me a song for the telethon. Something simple. “We Are the World” meets “Hope for Haiti.” Something like that. We can wipe out PMD in our lifetime. Won’t you give now?