The Year I Kicked Steroids, Part 1

It’s a cool and damp mid-January afternoon. 2021. We’ve gathered to celebrate Alex’s 28^th birthday.

I look out the kitchen window and see a light-green sedan in the driveway. “You got a new car, Rachael?” I ask.

“No. That’s my parents’ car.”

“I thought theirs was white?”

“It is.”

By then, Linda and Alex are staring out the window with us. They both see a white Lexus out there.

“Not even a slight shade of green?”

“Nope.”

Everyone blames my typically aberrant brain. And we forget about it.

All things considered, having a not-green car in the driveway really is ok. My sciatica has calmed down since its pre-Christmas escapades, thanks to some good drugs. It looks like COVID vaccines will be ready, at least for some of us, real soon. And we finally seem to be getting rid of Donald Trump – even after he sent his thugs to rumble at the Capitol. If we can make it another week, Joe Biden will be sworn into office. The worst president of the United States will become a sad footnote in our history. (Hindsight – unlike my eyesight – is 20/20.)

Part 1, Act II

A few weeks later, I visit my ophthalmologist. Driving at night is suddenly scary as shit. Lights – stoplights, street lights, oncoming cars’ headlights – seem to be multiplying. The new lights, in twos and threes, are slightly below and to the right of the real ones. In busy, two-way traffic, I face a terrifying sea of headlights, taillights and turn signals.

Seems the refraction for my glasses has changed suddenly. I am no more or less nearsighted. My reading vision has worsened just a bit. But the correction for my astigmatism is way off.

Astigmatism means the shape of your cornea or lens is irregular. Uncorrected, the light passing through focuses on more than one point on your retina. You get ghost images. Some get double vision. It’s worse at night cause your dilated pupils allow light rays into your eyes at many more angles.

A new refraction corrects the problem. The multitudes have receded, for a while. No one can conject why the sudden change. (Yes, “conject” is a real word, though now “considered obsolete.” Shakespeare used it in Othello.)

Somewhat Related Side Trips

While researching to make sure I was correctly describing astigmatism, I came across a perfect description and an awesome image. Sharing:

“The asymmetry in the shape of the cornea or lens can refract light in such a way that objects seem bent or warped, like how things look in a fun-house mirror.”

From a page on All About Vision, a website sponsored by an eyewear manufacturer. Italics are mine.

Not sure how to source this. Google Image Search finds it posted in 2016 on a Twitter account belonging apparently to a teenage American girl. All she says about the picture is, “#LSD #Alice #Wonderland #Acid #FirstTime 🙃🍄🌀👅.”

I hope she had a good trip. That’s kinda like how I was seeing things. Trippy.

Part 1, Act III

Snowmageddon, the great Texas winter freeze and storm, killed 250 and devastated thousands of lives. I’m still alive and wasn’t devastated, but I got hurt badly enough to propel this narrative forward. (I was going to say, “sustained an injury,” but no one talks like that except cops and lazy reporters – and I’m far enough removed from my reporter days to avoid that tripe.)

So I’m tromping back and forth across a patch of my front yard in two feet of snow, trying to uncover the metal plate over the city water connection. An exposed water line had frozen up between the valve and the house. I wanted to close the valve before the pressure burst the exposed line.

Now tromping, as you know, is more physical than simply walking. I’m treading heavily. I also sweep my feet back and forth to move the accumulating snow away from the ground, to reveal the hidden valve cover. Such quasi-violent action doesn’t exactly engender safety among lay trompers like me. Especially when it’s 10 degrees outside and I just want to get my ass back in front of a warm fire. When I tromp/sweep on a snow-covered patch of my yard that turned out to be a snow-covered, ice-covered patch of roadway, my right foot, knee, and hip decide to move in three different directions. I fall. I stand up. Doesn’t seem like anything is broken or seriously sprained. But my knee and back are telling me things aren’t right in here at all.

Soon, my back invites sciatica back after a couple months’ blessed absence. Bolts of pain once again shoot down the back of my leg into my foot. I wonder if surgeons can do a total leg replacement. I refill the Medrol Pak my neurologist had written back in December. That takes the edge off.

Part 1, Act IV

I hadn’t mentioned the green car incident to my ophthalmologist. I probably forgot about it. But it didn’t forget about me.

One day in early April, a friend parked her silver Prius on that same spot in that same driveway. I looked through the same kitchen window and saw a light green Prius. This time, I didn’t embarrass myself by asking her about a new car. I just walked out to the driveway. The closer I got, the silver-er her car got.

I started noticing similar phenomena while driving. White and light colored cars and signs took on that greenish hue from a distance. They regained their rightful colors as I got closer. Maybe it was a heavy coating of Austin springtime pollen? No one else seemed to see it. The internet turned up nothing. (Gotta admit, I struggled to find the right search terms. “White stuff turns green all of a sudden”?) I texted my ophthalmologist. She had never heard of a mysterious green shift. I started to suspect I’d need a different kind of doctor. Whiteness returned before I found a psychiatrist.

Part 1, Act V

My knee has now overtaken sciatica in the race to make my right leg a battlefield of pain. It reminds me daily about my pratfall in the snow. Tells me what a piss-poor tromper I am.

I dig up the cane my mom used before she died. Stretch it from mom height to Steve height. I look stupid – actually, I FEEL like I look stupid – hobbling around on that damn thing. I drag it along to my mother-in-law’s memorial service in Pennsylvania. I am the oldest person there. I feel like it.

Two weeks later, my orthopedic surgeon does a little needle-out/needle-in maneuver on the knee. He drains several ccs of fluid and injects some hydrocortisone. Ten days later, drains some more. An MRI shows another tear in the anterior medial meniscus (the front, inside part of the cartilage that lines the knee joint).

I go back for another drain/cortisone treatment. We put off surgery to see if it might heal on its own. I hobble on home.

Remy is born very soon after. I forget about my knee, my back, and my eyes as I snuggle with this tremendous bundle of joy.

To paraphrase that sad Reader’s Digest regular, grandbabies are the best medicine.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Image source: pxhere