Brown Sludge

Glasses for Algernon

November 14th, 2006

Very few people can claim to have actually experienced a miracle.

But I have.

To be clear, I am NOT talking figuratively here. I’m very seriously talking literally. And when I say “miracle” I want to also be clear that I’m not talking about the Lord’s face on my grilled cheese or a likeness of the Blessed Mother in my coffee cream.

I said “miracle”. As in… a Real Deal Miracle. As in a basically blind person getting their sight back.

Now… I’ve had crappy vision all of my life.

When I was 12 I had to get the big coke-bottle glasses. It made high school hard, this you must believe.

I’ve struggled with my crappy vision since I was a young boy. I’ve struggled with the thick glasses and thicker contact lenses forever. It was just a fact of life for me.

Without my glasses or contacts in, I couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of my face, and I certainly couldn’t read.

So… when I was recently diagnosed with diabetes (a gift from my Grandmother apparently), I was immediately given medication to begin controlling my blood sugar. I was given a crash course in insulin and injections and testing and finger sticking and which foods are good and which foods are bad and what will happen to me if I don’t keep my blood levels under tight control (by no means a canonical list : amputation, neuropathy, blindness, nerve damage, liver damage, pancreatic damage, cataracts, glaucoma and on and on the list goes.).

I have resolved to beat the disease through diet and exercise – but in the meantime I’m learning to control through medication and management techniques.

My levels had been under control for about a week when something absolutely amazing and unsettling happened. It was… surreal.

I woke up one morning, and I couldn’t see very well anymore. When I opened my eyes, everything was extremely blurry and I was… for all practical purposes… blind. I could only see vague shapes and outlines and generalized colors. It was as if someone had coated my eyes with a very thick layer of vasoline.

At first… I panicked. Seriously. As in… I almost called an ambulance. I was in full-on, balls-to-the-wall “oh my god – oh my god – oh my god” freak out mode.

Then… it occurred to me that I still had in my extended wear contact lenses. I wear the kind of disposable contacts that you can sleep in a few nights a week, if you’re careful to take them out and clean them when you’re supposed to. After a couple of weeks you throw them away and put in new ones. They’ve never given me a bit of trouble. Ever.

On a hunch I ran into the bathroom, and took them out.

And that’s when the miracle happened.

After taking my contacts out, I looked in the mirror and blinked a few times… and… realized… to my utter amazement… that I could see.

Perfectly.

Without my contacts in.

I looked all around the room. I ran outside and looked outside.

I could read the house-numbers all the way down the block and up.

My uncorrected vision… was… perfect.

As in… perfect. 20/20. Better I believe. Crisp. Clear. Perfect.

No coke-bottle glasses.

No contacts.

It was… a miracle.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, one of the first things out of my doctors mouth was an order to go *immediately* and get my eyes checked for retinopathy and cataracts and glaucoma. He stressed the importance over and over again, and warned me not to come back to my follow-up visit without a note from the ophthalmologist he recommended. He looked pretty serious.

I had headed his advice, and made the appointment as instructed, but… my new eyes had me concerned.

Now… those who know me well… know that it’s not out of character for me to be suspicious when something good happens to me without explanation. It’s absolutely “me” to view the fact that I had gotten my eyesight back as a sign of some impending doom to come. I can’t help it. It’s the way I was raised.

I ran immediately to the phone and called the ophthalmologists office, and asked them to bump my appointment up as far as they could. They told me to come in the next day.

I spent that night scouring the web for articles that related to what was going on with me, but didn’t find anything particularly useful.

The next day, the ophthalmologist listened to me patiently, and then sat back and told me flatly that he felt that I was probably mistaken.

So… he tested me.

First… he pulled my records. He could see that I had previously worn a -3.75 prescription.

Fairly steep as it were.

Then he had me sit in the chair and he gave me the standard eye test. Flipping lenses and chanting in a practiced monotone “Better? Worse? Better? Worse? A? B? 1? 2?” over and over again.

Then he sat back with a strange look on his face. “+.75” he said. Very little correction. My vision wasn’t perfect as I had suspected, but it was very close. Coming from where I was it had sure *seemed* perfect.

He was at a loss to explain it.

He wrote me a script for my new prescription, and told that me I could probably skip wearing them altogether if I so chose – it was probable that I could even have the restriction removed from my drivers license if I so chose and then he vowed to try to find some answers for me.

I could tell that he was genuinely puzzled by this course of events, and to be honest, as I said before – in typical “Mac” fashion - I left his office more worried than ever. It seemed… “too good to be true” – and an omen of bad things to come.

A couple of weeks passed, and I was beginning to enjoy not having to wear glasses, or contacts, and was of course driving my family and Pretty Jamie absolutely berserk by being obnoxious every time I got behind the wheel of my car and reading every single sign I passed out loud. Very loud. Just “because I can!”.

It was… a miracle. A genuine, bona fide, real deal… MIRACLE. A guy who had been basically blind for… 30 plus years… wasn’t blind anymore.

And then…

One of the greatest short stories of all times is Daniel Keyes’ incredible “Flowers for Algernon”. It’s about a mildly mentally disabled man, Charley, who undergoes an experimental procedure that corrects his disability. The experiment was originally performed on a laboratory mouse named Algernon, who became exceedingly smart as a result. Soon… Charley’s intelligence exceeds even those of his doctors. Then… Algernon begins to deteriorate rapidly, and the doctors worry that Charley will too.

I’ve thought about this story a lot lately.

You see… the ophthalmologist called me.

He’d been so intrigued by my “miracle” that he did a bit of research, and discovered the reason for the change in my vision. And he called to tell me the good news. And the bad.

The good news : apparently, a very rare side effect of the diabetes medication that I was put on is a swelling of the lenses of the eyes. This swelling had – through absolute and unbelievable luck – been exactly enough to correct my vision giving me nearly perfect eyesight. A one in a million collision of factors.

The bad news : like Algernon in Daniel Keyes novella, the side effects wouldn’t last. In the days to come my body will begin to accept the new medications and mitigate the side effects, and the lenses in my eyes will return to their original shape.

Only ½ jokingly, I told him he was wrong – and that I was going to keep my vision – and that I would call him in a few weeks to tell him he was wrong, and rub it in. He laughed a sad little laugh and told me good naturedly that he would gladly accept my call and be happy to hear it, but he added that he didn’t feel it was very likely.

So…

Monday night I went to bed as usual. Before I turned the lights out I said a little prayer as I had for many nights before that, and thanked the Father for the return of my vision, and asked that it might not be a temporary thing.

This morning I awoke… to… fuzz.

Just like that. Overnight.

Everything was back to being blurry.Knowing the truth, and fighting a big sinking pit in my stomach… I went into the bathroom, and quietly slipped the big, old, 1970’s style wire-framed coke-bottle glasses out of their genuine naugahyde case, and slid them on.

The world swam back into focus. My vision perfectly corrected by the -3.75 lenses.

The eye doctor had been right after all.

The perfect vision I had been so proud of… was gone.

Algernon had returned to the place from where he’d come.

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Entry Filed under: General, Thoughts