Eye of the Beholder

eye
By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Kim Kankiewicz

I wait in a lobby with purple carpet and rounded walls and a magazine rack stuffed with picture books. A fifty-gallon aquarium nests in a cubby four feet above the ground. Orange and green nursery school furniture occupies the central space, surrounded by clusters of adult-sized chairs. I am thirty-five years old and the only patient here without a parent.

My life story could be set in eye doctors’ offices. I’ve been pinned by technicians to a reclining chair in Phoenix as my first ophthalmologist dropped atropine into my pupils. I’ve written fawning essays about an eye doctor in South Dakota who nicknamed me Trouper. I’ve leaned into tonometry machines in Iowa and Kansas, with medical students lined up to scrutinize me. I’ve mourned for an eye doctor in Minnesota who died of cancer. I’ve formed an uneasy friendship with the wife of an eye doctor in Nebraska who had an affair with his nurse. I learned I was pregnant from an ophthalmologist in Boulder reviewing pre-operative blood work.

In all those encounters, I’ve never been the right age for my eye clinic. As a child with glaucoma, I grew accustomed to being an anachronism. Among the crepe skin and hunched backs, I was pink cheeks and muscled legs. It was one of the ways my visual impairment made me uncomfortably visible.

I laugh when, two decades after my diagnosis, I find myself the lone adult patient in a room full of children sporting eye patches and doll-sized spectacles. The mother next to me, a nervous twenty-something, glances my way, and I pretend to be amused by the book I’m holding. I hadn’t considered what should have been obvious when I scheduled this appointment: a specialist in strabismus, colloquially known as “lazy eye,” is primarily a pediatric ophthalmologist.

This is confirmed when the doctor enters the exam room twenty minutes later. He is wearing a Mickey Mouse tie. He skims the pages in my fat file and wheels his chair over. We sit knee to knee as he shines a penlight into my blind eye, then studies it through a scope.

“Working around your other surgeries, I can get you to eighty percent alignment,” he says.

“Would this be covered by insurance?” I can see nothing from my right eye, which is why it’s wandered further off kilter every year since the surgery in my teens that marred my appearance without saving my sight.

“It’s medically justifiable,” the doctor says. There’s some practical benefit: face-to-face communication would be less distracting for my conversation partners. And my blind eye takes in just enough light to claim a functional benefit.

Realistically, though, strabismus surgery won’t improve my vision and isn’t necessary. I knew this when I made the appointment. What I am contemplating is, for all intents and purposes, cosmetic surgery.

•••

I once vowed, horrified when a classmate had breast implants before she was old enough to vote, that I would never opt for surgery that wasn’t medically necessary. My smug self-assurance came from an unusually informed perspective. By my twenties, I’d lost count of the eye surgeries I’d endured. Enough to have preferences regarding anesthesia. (Fentanyl is nice.) I knew that surgery is always nightmarish, recovery always excruciating.

The collective experience of surgery made me feel like a cadaver, indifferently carved open and sewn back together. When the doctor in Boulder joked that mine was his first pregnancy announcement after screening for six thousand cataract operations, I wasn’t impressed. I was just glad to be distinguishable from the other 5,999 patients.

Only on the operating table did I want my handicap to stand out. Everywhere else, I wanted to appear intact. I tried to achieve this by excelling in school, performing onstage, and ultimately starving and exercising my body until it collapsed and I left college for bulimia treatment. Eating disorders are complicated, their genesis complex, but I know mine originated between an exam chair where I squinted against the light and a school hallway where I wore sunglasses indoors, between a hospital bed where I wanted to be conspicuous and a waiting room where I did not.

Healing from an eating disorder is simultaneously complicated and simple. Recovery is a lifetime process, but it often comes down to treating oneself with both gentleness and brutal honesty. I’ve acknowledged my self-absorption, my complicity with a system that values women’s adherence to narrow standards of beauty above all else. Most of the time, I resist preoccupation with my appearance by throwing balled-up socks at the television when a woman is blatantly objectified and asking myself who would possibly benefit if I were more attractive.

Who will benefit if my wonky right eye is aligned with the left one? I don’t believe anyone has ever been too distracted by my lopsided gaze to maintain a coherent conversation with me. I suspect some acquaintances have not even noticed what feels to me like a huge deformity. Despite the growth I think I’ve experienced, I have to consider that in the end this surgery is nothing more than vanity.

•••

The operation takes place at a children’s hospital. The intake nurse, who rarely needs to differentiate between patient and child, talks to me in a high-pitched voice. Even when she catches herself, she seems unable to adjust her register. To add to her discomfiture, I am accompanied by my mother because my husband was called away on out-of-state business. My mother has experienced nearly as many eye surgeries as I have and is worried primarily about finding her way back to my house if I’m not lucid enough to navigate. She comforts me, unexpectedly, in a way my husband could not.

“It’s a simple repair,” she says. “Nothing to feel conflicted about.”

Mothers don’t cause eating disorders, but if you made a list of the ways they might contribute to them, very few of those factors would apply to my mom. She has an incomprehensibly easy relationship with food. She makes healthy choices as a way of life. I don’t recall her uttering a single deprecating remark about her body or mine. The closest she came to criticizing my appearance was asking semi-regularly, “Is that what you’re wearing today?” as if I’d donned a costume to amuse her before dressing in my actual clothes. (Retrospective photographic evidence explains her bewilderment.)

I didn’t understand my own feelings about my eye disease, and I hid them from my mother. She hid from me the likelihood that I’d be blind before adolescence, the plan to relocate to a city with a blind school, the fears that she was inadequate to help me survive. What I saw was my parents’ unwavering presence. Intuiting that my vision was at risk, I was unworried. My parents would take care of me. Little did I know my mother felt as insufficient as I did.

The surgery is not as simple as my mother predicts. Through the haze of anesthesia, the operating team’s conversation sounds graver than usual. The operation, I later learn, lasts an hour longer than scheduled. When I awake, my surgeon explains that he discovered additional real estate left from previous operations. He’d altered his game plan to avoid damaging a shunt. In practical terms, this means more pain and less certainty of success.

It will be days before my eye turns from blood-red to white, weeks before I can peruse the lasting impact of surgery. Will it noticeably change my appearance? Will it change anything else?

“I’m glad you could be here,” I tell my mom, when she has driven us home without a wrong turn.

“Me too,” she says.

•••

My children are solicitous when they return from a friend’s house after my operation. This is their first brush with eye surgery, and their concern charms me. I explain the procedure as my mom defined it for me, as a repair. They don’t know the surgery is an attempt to improve my appearance; I won’t let on that I wish to be beautiful. It’s an intermittent desire, one that no longer defines me, yet I’ve gone under the knife to satisfy it.

I want to spare my little girl from measuring her value in a mirror, but Signe is learning, inevitably, that beauty matters. She has confided that she hopes she is pretty enough to have friends in kindergarten. I stumbled through what I hoped was an appropriate response, enumerating the qualities that make her a good friend. She looked unconvinced.

When Signe stared at my face a few months before surgery, I thought of an essay by Alice Walker. Walker dreaded the day her daughter would notice her mother’s disfigured eye, just as my daughter was noticing mine. The pivotal moment in Walker’s essay is when her daughter remarks, “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” I shouldn’t set much store by this atypically affectionate account of Walker’s relationship with her now estranged daughter. Even so, I was crushed when my little girl said, “Your eye looks scary.”

She recognized my hurt before I masked it and apologized for days afterward. I reassured her she’d done nothing wrong, talked about how differences make us beautiful, told her my blind eye reminded me to be grateful for the eye that can see. But she had observed that deep down, I too hope I’m pretty enough to belong.

You won’t find integral as a synonym for beautiful in any thesaurus. In my vocabulary, they share meaning. Integral means both whole and essential to the whole. If you are integral, you are complete, and the world would not be complete without you. What I have learned over years of reflection is that when I long to be beautiful, I long to be integral.

•••

Three weeks after surgery, my irises are horizontally aligned so closely you might think they were allies. The overall effect, however, is unremarkable. My right iris remains a paler shade of green than the left. My right pupil is still the black-marker dot of a child’s drawing, never dilating because it never beholds light. My right eyelids, stretched and sliced over decades of treatment, still gape like snarled lips.

As a child, I heard a doctor say my disease could “burn out” by adolescence. I imagined a celebration, like a sweet sixteen party with balloons and cake, attended by my friends, my doctors, the aunts and uncles who inquired about my eyes during holiday dinners, the teachers who had visited me at the hospital. Now, as an adult who should have outgrown such naive fantasies, I had let myself believe again that a single moment in my ocular history could unbreak what came before.

Most days I am reconciled with the badge of my brokenness. Most days understanding my desire for beauty as a desire for wholeness is enough to make peace with it. Most days I believe I am integral to—and through—my mother and daughter and every woman who wants to be integral, too. But some days I close my eyes, unseeing and unseen, and dream of revision.

•••

KIM KANKIEWICZ has written for Brain, Child, Denver’s Westword, the Saint Paul Almanac, and public radio. She is a recent transplant to the Seattle area, where she hasn’t yet found an eye doctor.

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Fear and Rafting on the Rio Grande

whitewater
By David Berkowitz/ Flickr

By Zahie El Kouri

We have paddled beyond the point of return.

I am in the left front corner of a rubber raft. The guide has told me that if I jam my leg into the groove between the outside air chamber and the one that makes the floor, I’m less likely to fall out of the raft, so I jam my leg so hard that my left butt cheek aches.

The guide, who is almost certainly stoned, decides to do a safety check. “Everyone raise your oar like this.”

He holds his paddle up vertically, with the wide side toward the water. He does it with a sort of swagger, like this job makes him much cooler than scared city girls like me. I mimic his action precisely, clutching my oar in fear. My husband and his sister do the same, with confidence. My sister-in-law’s partner Dawn holds her paddle up, too, but she holds it horizontally, so the wide side is facing the center of the boat.

“I said this way,” the guide repeats. “You need to look at me.” The guide is sun-leathered and rangy, his hair bleachy-blond.

“I can’t look at you,” my sister-in-law says. “I’m blind.”

This statement comes as no surprise to me, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the guide either, as we’d discussed Dawn’s blindness with him when we arrived.

We’re on the Rio Grande, the five of us: my husband John, outdoorsy and fearless; his sister Liz, a four-foot-ten Krav Maga instructor; her partner, Dawn, an executive with a Manhattan non-profit; and me.

I am full of fear: I am afraid of heights; I am afraid of riding a bike in traffic; I am afraid of getting a concussion while skiing like I did when I was eleven. I generally don’t talk about my fears like a Woody Allen protagonist, but I try to avoid situations where I put myself in what I perceive to be danger. The more rational part of my brain tells me that lots of people go rafting without injury and that I have reached an age where I am willing to give this kind of risk another try. Nonetheless, I am happy for my helmet and my life jacket, and even though I have lost all feeling in my left leg, I jam it further into the raft.

Since neither Dawn nor I had ever been rafting, we signed up for the beginning level trip, a leisurely float down the calm part of the river. When we arrived, though, Liz and Dawn snuck away to change our trip to the intermediate one, which included something called “class three rapids.” I am terrified, but I don’t want to ruin everyone’s fun. Dawn, on the other hand, is smiling, her legs casually resting on the floor of the raft.

The guide says, “Well, just pay attention.” When we approach the first set of rapids, I paddle as hard as I can, against every instinct I have to curl into the fetal position. When we’re clear of the rapids, I see that everyone else in the boat is smiling, while I’m just happy to be in one piece. The next few rapids are the same—fear for me, smiles for everyone else. After the fourth set of rapids, we float along the river for long enough that I am able to take in the greens and browns of the riverbank.

That’s when I notice the large boulder in the center of our path. It is taking up most of the river, but it looks like there’s just enough room on either side for us to get by. Water splashes up the rock and churns around it in a great white frenzy.

“That’s a big rock,” I say to my husband.

“Yeah. Which way should we go?” he asks the guide.

“Oh, we’re just going to bounce off that thing,” the guide says.

“Bounce?” I squeak.

“Just paddle as hard as you can right up onto that rock, and then we’ll bounce off to the right.”

This does not sound like a good idea to me, but I am a lowly city girl who can’t feel her left leg. The rock looms ever closer, and I paddle as hard as I can straight on top of it. My corner of the raft hits the boulder. We bounce once off the rock and land sideways, the right edge of the boat hitting the water.

I am still in the boat! Hooray!

I look to my right. The seat next to mine is empty. John and Dawn and the guide are all in the water. Liz is leaning over the side of the boat, holding Dawn by her collar. John erupts from the water and climbs back in, his leg bloody.

“Dawn’s in the water,” I shout. The water swirls innocently around the raft. John jumps back in the water, helping Dawn clamber back in to the center of the boat, soaked and grimacing.

The guide lifts himself into the raft.

“Y’all took a swim?” the guide asks. “Get a little wet?”

Dawn grumbles.

“Dude,” the guide says, as about to share the wisdom of the ages. “It’s all about facing your fears.”

Dawn whips her head around to face the direction of the guide’s voice. “I do enough of that taking the subway in Manhattan every day while being blind.”

The guide says nothing. John and Liz turn away from him, back in their places.

Dawn stays in the center of the boat, shaking. “Is she going to stay there?” the guide asks.

“Yes,” says Liz. “She’s had enough.”

The guide looks at John, alone on the right side of the boat.

Dude,” he says, “you’ll have to paddle harder.”

He says it to John, but I take the message. We launch again, and I paddle with a new determination. Dawn has navigated New York City blind for thirty years; now she is thrown from a raft in the middle of the Rio Grande and climbs back in. Who am I to be afraid?

•••

ZAHIE EL KOURI writes about infertility, parenting, and the immigrant experience in the United States. She has taught creative writing at the University of North Florida and the University of Oregon Law School, and legal writing at Santa Clara University and Florida Coastal School of Law. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New School University and her work has appeared in Mizna, a Journal of Arab-American Writing and Dinarzad’s Children: an Anthology of Arab-American Literature, Memoir Journal, Brain, Child, and Ars Medica. You can find her on the web at www.zahieelkouri.com.