“I’m going to make a small incision–”
The surgeon held her thumb and forefinger up to show me a distance of about four miles.
“IN YOUR EYE and then–”
The happy smiling woman kept moving her mouth, painting images in my brain that would grow grotesque and monstrous and slip into my dreams to gnaw at my psyche and rip at my soul and leave me staring at the ceiling over my bed.
“I’ll just slip the rolled lens in–––”
“NO NO NO NO.”
I waved my hands in the doctor’s face.
“Here’s what’s going to happen.”
I resurrected my mother-knows-best-now-sit-down-and-shut-up voice. Pulled a deep breath of over-heated air in, and out. Smiled.
“I’m going to come to the surgery center, hereto known as The Land of Magic, and you are going to cast a good fairy spell over me which will carry me to the land of peaceful dreams. While I play with unicorns and rub my face in Aslan’s mane, you shall wave your glittery wand over my clouded eye. When I awaken, presto-chango, my eye will be cataract free and I’ll possess the sight of a young maiden.”
Yesterday was the surgery. A few glittery sprinkles of fairy dust evidently fell magically through the air and embedded themselves in my eye, but, the above is more-or-less an accurate description of how the procedure went. This morning I see that my white kitchen cupboards may show the dirt a little more than I thought yesterday, Chesty has a bit more gray around the muzzle than I realized, and that lovely soft patina on the headboard of the bed is actually a layer of dust.
We live in a wonderful age. We have the opportunity to grow old very, very slowly, supplementing our youth with fake teeth and eyes and bionic knees and hips. So, here’s my question for you.
When you avail yourself of these miraculous youth-restoring gifts, do you prefer your fairy godmother, er surgeon, give you all the nitty gritty details, or would you rather she tiptoed in, waved her wand of glimmery science and handed you a black and white copy of all the God awful ways the magic may go wrong, stapled, of course, to a list of hungry attorneys?
Pamela Foster, Author and Speaker 
I like all the details. Maybe that’s why I mostly write non-fiction! But I really liked your version of it, too. Fairy dust for everybody!
Here, here. Yes! Fairy dust for everyone!
I vote for fairy dust, especially when it comes to my eyes. That first sentence of yours. . . it might as well have been the first sentence in a horror story. 🙂 I’m glad the “magic” worked!
It’s odd how so often reality is so much easier to deal with then the IDEA, don’t you think?
Fairy Dust is good, but only if you can trap the litigation fairy in a bottle.
She hates being imprisoned under that glass too.
Reblogged this on 06cedmuho.
When I was young, doctors almost never told their patients or their kin when the diagnosis was cancer, presumably in the belief that people could not handle that kind of information. That was wrong. There is nothing so terribly bad with fairty dust, but at the end of the day, we have to deal with reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.
In theory, I agree, Hugh. But I still have nightmares from the doctor’s description of my spinal fusion when I was twelve. I think that, if I need to know, if the knowledge can in any away affect my healing or behavior then I must know everything. But truth is not the same as gory details and recently, fear of litigation seems to be fueling a revealing of far too many details that need to be known, in my opinion, by no one but the surgeon.
Maybe not fairy dust, but not forensic detail either. A middle ground somewhere, perhaps.