Seeing Eye to Eye

Will and I can now see eye to eye on his eyes.

Rhcastilhos. And Jmarchn at wiki commons

On Monday morning we went to see the second ophthalmologist at Orion Eye Center, Dr. Laith Kadasi, a very handsome young fellow who worked kindly with Will, in spite of Will's occasional lapses in understanding. We saw him after the assistant had already done a bunch of views, including taking pictures.  The female assistant had trouble getting Will to put his head in the cup and against the headrest -- no matter where she put it he kept moving around and complaining about the bad design.

This is an aspect of his personality that is still recognizably Will -- his assumption that if things aren't working "correctly" that the world outside of him is at fault -- not him.  This is one way that he is like some members of my family of origin -- blaming rather than being accountable.  It's also a part of who he is that has had negative impact on me over the years because I am the opposite.  

Through most of my life my mind has struggled with a negative narcissism -- believing myself responsible for many of the bad things that happen outside of me, especially the sadness or anger of other people.  When I was a child in sixth grade I believed that all the tension I felt in our home was due to me and that if I died everyone would be happier so I started praying to die. I used to feel desperate when my Mom was sad and terrified when she was angry.  After my oldest sister's "explosion" into madness when I was in high school, I divorced myself from my family in my head and fled.  I fell in love with Will just nine months after our family's entrance into the tragic. And shortly after I fell in love I started responding to his facial expressions the same way I did to my Moms -- becoming scared when he looked angry, becoming desperate and unhappy when he was sad.

It took me decades to figure out that Will's emotions belonged to him and mine belonged to me.

But I am still highly reactive to his anger and sorrow.  And he was quite angry when he was at Orion on Monday.  He kept insisting on "NO SURGERY!"  

Fortunately, after the examination, the doctor agreed.  Not because the surgery would not be warranted were Will a younger man. The doc made sure I understood that so I wouldn't be going around telling people the wrong thing.

The retina in Will's right eye is indeed torn, but it was torn so long ago that there's a lot of scar tissue around it.  That makes the surgery so complicated it would have to be done in Portland at OHSU.  Well, the complicated nature of the surgery combined with Will's age and obvious disinclination to have surgery resulted in a recommendation of "watch and wait:"  keeping watch on the left eye so he doesn't lose sight in that one and keeping aware of any pain that could result from the shrinking or changed in the right eye.  He still has just a tiny bit of sight in that eye -- but just at the bottom.

Toward the end of the exam Will started talking about "Dr. Timm's mother" as being better than anyone.  I held his arm and said something to stop him from going off on that story -- maybe I said, "They don't know Dr. Tim," and I said something to the assistant, maybe "this is one of his stories."  This story is a fantasy.  It is based on a visit he took to the dentist during which an "older woman" cleaned his teeth (a woman in her 40s maybe).  He created a story that she was our dentist's mother.  Then in the telling she became not cleaner but a doctor herself.  I think this is because his brain was conflating Dr. Timm with an old friend, Dr. Richard Howard whose wife may also have been a doctor and whose mother surely was, as she was the famous Dr. Minnie Howard.

He has long done this -- made up stories.  It was rarely a game that I could play with him because I was usually far too serious and I didn't understand the game, but he's had other people in his life that he could play with.  Sometimes he would do voices when he made up the stories, hence his strange use of a Southern accent with the IRS agent back in 2010.  

So I am now sad about Will's lack of complete sight in his right eye but relieved that I will not have to either talk him into an unwanted surgery OR feel guilty for not talking him into it.