The eye doctor told my father he had herpes. You should have been there.
The eye doctor told my father he had herpes. You should have been there.
The ophthalmologist is a family friend. We call him Willy. When I was in junior high, Willy was the one to explain why I will only ever catch a high pop-up fly with my face, if at all. I had a fat lip, and the orthodontist sent me over to Willy.
I can't remember the diagnostic name for it, but what I have boils down to this: One of my eyes works for a while, then gets tired and shuts off, so the other one turns itself on, to, like, pick up the slack. Only one eye sees at a time.
Now, the evolutionary purpose of putting both eyes on the front of the face, binocular vision, is depth perception. I have none. I think I do, because the brain can really compensate. But when the only points of reference are endless blue sky and little wisps of cloud, that white leather sphere is gonna shoot straight through my up-stretched hands every time and whack me right in the kisser.
Thanks, Willy, for breaking it down for me.
So if somebody's gotta tell your pops he's got Da Herps in his eyeball, this is the doc.
My father is 83. He may not be a towering intellect, but he's worked hard his whole life, and he knows who he is and who he ain't. And who he ain't is somebody who ever hears the words, "I'm sorry to tell you, Gene, but you have a herpetic lesion on the cornea of your eye."
Herpetic as in herpes.
I shouldn't admit it, but a quiet little boy inside me was sitting on his hands and biting his cheek. My grownup face was blank, my voice flat, and I said to Willy, "You have to tell him you don't mean the STD."
Because it was about the first time in history my father had been at a total loss for words.
A speechless father can be a priceless thing. There rarer, the more exquisite.
So, as Willy told (medically speaking) tall tales about chicken pox and dormant viruses, and Gene regained his composure and returned to the jocular offensive, I stole a private moment.
Willy's soothing explanation was (medically speaking) a tall tale, and my father was (very briefly) wordless and aghast for the same reason -- or nexus of reasons.
The etiologies of herpes simplex and herpes zoster remain imprecisely defined. In my father's case, diagnosis was made indirectly, by visual appreciation. (That means Willy put dye in the eye, dilated the pupil, and looked in there with a really bright light.) Nobody proposed sticking a needle in there, drawing fluid, and sending it to the lab. In fact, a couple sub-specialists just told me conflicting things about how there is no such test, or there is, but it's prohibitively expensive.
Anyway, etiology, schmeeteeology. The moral stigma of what my parents' generation called venereal disease lives on. So pops has something related to chicken pox, but morally distinct from the clap, infecting his eyeball. By dinner time, he was okay with that. Now he can tell you down to the tenth of a penny how much Acyclovir costs per pill.
I'm no towering genius either, but, believe it or not, this is where my mind was already going in that stolen moment in Willy's indirectly-lighted office.
Between volunteering at the needle exchange and too many years working in that shady intersection of public health and criminal justice, I thought I'd learned something. As soon as I heard my voice speak, "tell him it's not the STD," I learned something about myself all right. A sleeping hypocrite inside me will wake up and blurt something out of my mouth at a moment's notice.
I thought my non-judgmental credentials were in good order. I grew up in the first AIDS generation, when my sexual awakening and anti-parental rebellion coincided with a massive, reactionary social backlash, during which I saw my friends die, and Gene and I didn't speak for years.
"Tell him not the STD" -- what a crock. What can I ever know about the history -- sexual or otherwise -- of this wisecracking, never-at-a-loss-for-words, lifelong salesman? He always seemed like such a nerd, doctor. He had to have been a virgin when he married my mother, doctor.
Whoever struggles daily with a chronic infection: If I judged you by distancing my father from you, I did so to my shame. If my critical thinking skills failed me, it wasn't the first time and it won't be the last. I've admitted I don't have very good depth perception and I can't nail a moving target.
In my defense, it seems like the doctors I just spent the day talking to couldn't teach a monkey to scratch its ass.
And you really should have been there, just to see his face. Just for that moment.