Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  After further urging, Dr. Mortson consulted with a Dr. Walter King, who then examined me. It was from him that my family and I first heard my condition diagnosed as “glaucoma.” We soon learned a great deal about this insidious disease, often stealthy at its onset, that causes abnormally high pressure within the eyeball. That pressure, if not properly diagnosed and treated, may lead to damage of the optic nerve.

  The dangerous extent of my glaucoma was most likely caused by the very eye drops Dr. Mortson had been prescribing—corticosteroids, directly to my eyes. Corticosteroids are widely and properly used as anti-inflammatories to treat a variety of disorders, such as dermatitis, arthritis, asthma, and allergies. In people with a “predisposition,” however, application of corticosteroids to the eyes may lead to glaucoma. At the very least, when corticosteroids are administered topically to the eyes, the pressure inside the eyeball should be closely monitored and the lenses examined periodically for cataracts. All this was common knowledge at the time. Yet Dr. Mortson did neither.

  As a result, I now had a new and far more serious problem. I was told that, given the advanced state of my glaucoma, I had a choice of only three locations for evaluation and treatment: Boston, San Francisco, and Detroit. As the only recommended surgeon available soon was Dr. Sol Sugar, at Detroit Sinai Hospital, we arranged to see him at the earliest opportunity.

  Unfortunately, my father Carl’s junk business had slipped into decline, and despite my mother’s remarks to the contrary, I knew that the possibility of a return to penury loomed. Moreover, my health insurance through the family’s plan had expired once I turned nineteen. There was no choice but to proceed anyway.

  Since the November election, I had eagerly anticipated traveling to Washington for the JFK inaugural events, but I now realized that was not going to happen, any more than I would be returning to Columbia on time to start my next semester—if I was even allowed to after skipping out on exams. In only a few short weeks, my world had been transformed from one of boundless expectations to one of frightening uncertainty.

  Inauguration Day at least provided a distraction. I had enjoyed speaking on behalf of Senator Kennedy during his campaign and was thrilled at his election. Now, lying on my living-room floor in Buffalo simultaneously watching television and listening to the radio, I regained some of my enthusiasm. Then, as this promising, bright young president concluded his address, I heard words that seemed to outline the specter of my future:

  “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

  I arose from the floor and heard nothing more; my mind turned inward as I stumbled upstairs in the half light to my bedroom. I was restless and exhausted, but sleep was no comfort. I had been brought low by one of those enemies President Kennedy had mentioned. In the years since, I have not forgotten those words of the president.

  Certain dates in one’s life are never forgotten. One for me is Monday, February 13, 1961—the day of the scheduled appointment with Dr. Sugar in Detroit.

  My mother and I took the train from Buffalo to Detroit, checked into the Detroit Statler Hotel, then went directly to Dr. Sugar’s office. It was late in the afternoon. The doctor’s other patients had left, and we were ushered into his office immediately.

  The venetian blinds were open, the sun of a cold winter day streaming in. Dr. Sugar measured my eye pressure using what he explained was an electronic tonograph machine. When he discovered that the pressure in my eyes was so high that it could not even register precisely on the machine, he was outraged. “Why did they wait so long?” he shouted. “Why did they wait so long?”

  It did not occur to me until later to think about who the “they” were and what it was “they” waited so long to do. Because I couldn’t see, I could not read my mother’s face. But I can imagine her expression was just as confused as mine.

  Dr. Sugar then guided me from the examination table to a small, round metal stool. My mother sat in a wooden chair to my right while Dr. Sugar stood above me and put his ophthalmoscope to my eyes. His brow was touching my brow. This man had the hairiest, bushiest eyebrows I’d ever seen. Though, of course, I could only feel them. And then he pulled away—I could feel him do this, like a ripping apart. Very slowly he stood upright, paused for a moment, and said flatly, not in the direction of my mother or me in particular, maybe just to himself:

  “Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow.”

  It was a strange thing to hear someone say. Strange that he used the old-fashioned colloquialism “son,” and without really directing the remark to me. But oddest of all was to hear a person say, in all seriousness, that someone is simply going to be blind. He did not explain how this person was going to be blind, just that he was. And maybe odder still was that the person—the “son”—was me.

  Although I suppose Dr. Sugar continued to speak, after that sentence I heard nothing. He was the ultimate judge in my brand-new world. Any appeal beyond him would be futile. I had always assumed—as young people nowadays do—that a top specialist such as Dr. Sugar would be able to solve my problem with pills or eye drops or…something. A quick fix, then back to college. For months, with the arrogance of youth, I had leaned on that absurd rationalization and had taken no action to resolve my worsening eye condition. But in one instant, Dr. Sugar had blasted that confidence away. “You are going to be blind tomorrow.” My life—all that I had been working at and was expecting to become—was ruined.

  Enraged, I clenched my fists and began rising from the stool. My body twisted toward Dr. Sugar. My right arm, the arm that had once thrown the shot put, was now positioned for what might have been a blow to his face. Fortunately, probably because my mother was there, I hesitated, and then sat back down. Meanwhile, my mother sat quietly in her chair. What thoughts were racing through her mind? Her years of sacrifice must certainly have dissipated in that same terrible moment of the surgeon’s statement. Her eldest son had just been consigned to life in a dark world.

  I sat frozen on the stool, clasping my stomach. No one spoke for long moments. It could not be happening to me—I would not let it. As Dr. Sugar began outlining his clinical plan, my body stiffened.

  “I don’t like to operate on both eyes at once,” he said, “but because of the severity of your condition, I must. Surgery will be scheduled for tomorrow.” At that, he left the office.

  We hadn’t even thought to ask what operation he would be performing. At any rate, I could not have asked him in front of my mother. We gathered our belongings and went back to the hotel. Drained, I moved slowly toward my bed. As I began to sit down, I suddenly realized that I had misjudged the bed’s position. I could not stop my fall. My back hit the floor, then my head.

  The next day—Valentine’s Day—I was admitted to Detroit Sinai Hospital, accompanied by my mother. Shortly before the operation was to begin, two large men strapped me onto a gurney and began wheeling me out, leaving her behind in my hospital room. As cold air rushed over my face, I heard the orderlies saying that because of my age, this was an unusual case. Glaucoma seldom occurs in people as young as nineteen, so the film that was to be made of the surgery could be “valuable.” I also heard someone comment that Dr. Sugar would be submitting articles about this case to “the journals.” Just as the anesthesia was about to be administered, I asked Dr. Sugar what caused glaucoma. He said, “No one knows—and they won’t know in my lifetime or in yours.” The doctor was not a garrulous man.

  “Doctor, what operation will you be performing?” I asked.

  He replied very slowly and loudly, as though I was not only blind but also deaf or mentally handicapped (a phenomenon I was to experience repeatedly in the future): “Bi-lat-er-al tre-phi-na-tions.” If spoken softly, the words
sound rather lyrical. In reality, they are anything but. It had been determined not only that the glaucoma, which had developed aggressively, would very soon effectively destroy my eyes but that the condition had induced an increase in pressure so severe that I would need to have my eyes surgically altered.

  In the procedure, Dr. Sugar made holes in my eyes, cutting through the delicate mucous membrane covering the inside of my eyelids and then slashing through the wall of each eye to open a channel until fluid began gushing out and forming pools in the wounds. To accomplish this, he used what today’s surgeons would consider crude instruments. They were like miniature pickaxes, and they mutilated my eyes.

  In effect, Dr. Sugar destroyed my vision to save my eyeballs—an irony I live with still. But he had no choice: my condition was too far advanced to correct. Moreover, given what was then the standard treatment, there is some question as to whether earlier surgery would have made any difference. In any event, scar tissue began to form almost immediately on the walls of the holes in my eyes. That tissue—strong, tensile, thick, and fibrous—would eventually clog my eyes’ drainage channels, causing further perilous increases in pressure and necessitating more surgeries.

  There is a moment that occurs at least once in just about everyone’s life, and all too commonly several times: the instant just after bad news has been given when you suddenly look back on your life and say, “My God, I did not realize how nice I had it until now.” As I write this, I am trying to think whether that one day at the doctor’s office in Detroit really was my worst day. If death outweighs everything, then the day my father died should claim that dubious honor. But I was very young then and able to get on with a life of normal hopes and dreams. The gods hadn’t yet raised me up so they could bring me low.

  What I do know for certain is that the kind of moment I experienced in Dr. Sugar’s office subtracts something from a person. Afterward, you spend the rest of your life building yourself back up, as if the whole of your being had been cut out. And so every heartbeat of life from then on, every millisecond, every hour, every day is a matter of additions and subtractions to that moment. You work and work to get back to the feeling of wholeness, because all the good things—and one always hopes for more good things—allow your net balance of additions and subtractions to run into the black.

  I save everything. Always have. Whenever I feel subtracted—just as I did that day in Detroit, completely and wholly subtracted—I can go back to the things I have saved: letters, tapes, videotapes, cards, telegrams, photographs, articles, journals, diaries, catalogues, and receipts. I look at them and feel better. These items are the precipitate of time. The longer you hold antiques, the higher their value. I am into antiquities. And tradition. And memory.

  For me, memory is not casual daydreaming; it has been a life-sustaining activity. The process of thinking about my good moments and my bad moments, my good luck and my bad luck, functions for me something like an old-fashioned carpenter’s spirit level. It has allowed me to steady myself, as though it were an extension of my limbic system (which, incidentally, is a bit handicapped for a blind person).

  So to be coolly logical: that day in Detroit—Monday, February 13, 1961—was not, as I sometimes find myself thinking, the summation of a life. It does not define me. It was not my destiny—although it seemed definitively to be so at the time. It was just a day. On the day I found out I was going to be blind, people were going about their business as usual. I had to go ahead and discover what the rest of my life would look like.

  PART 2

  A Bridge

  Over Troubled Waters

  8

  Lights Out

  As the effects of the anesthesia receded, I was wheeled back from post-op to my room. My hands rose to rub my eyes but instead encountered metal pads. I sank into the bed and said nothing. For a reason I still do not understand, I was unable to speak. My mother sat in a chair at the foot of the bed; she, too, was mute. Many long minutes later, after I had fallen into a deep funk, my eyes started to hurt. Had ice picks been plunged into them? The pain intensified, and I began to scream. The more I reacted, the worse it got. My hands gripped the metal bars on the sides of my bed as if that would mitigate the pain. The nurses came rushing in and quickly removed the metal pads from my eyes; as they did, tears dropped onto my cheeks. Apparently, the salt in my teardrops had caused the torment. Once the pads were removed and the tears drained, the pain subsided.

  I lay exhausted on the bed, unable to express my boiling feelings. There was a great deal of pain not only in my eyes but in my heart. Surprisingly, the most significant pain was not about me but from knowing that my mother had just witnessed her son lose his eyesight. That thought made the emotional pain nearly intolerable. I realized she must have sat looking at her son’s wounded eyes. I sensed her suppressing the heaving of her chest.

  I remembered a moment when I was five. Shortly after my father’s death, a tall, husky bearded rabbi wearing a skullcap crouched before me. He took my hand and placed it on the large, round, shiny crystal of the leather-strapped watch encircling his thick wrist. “Look at the hand as it moves past each second,” he said. “Once past, each second is gone. It will never return again.” Those words now returned to me with staggering force. Time lost and opportunities squandered: further emotional pain.

  I had seen my widowed mother’s tribulations, particularly in my youngest years—her tireless efforts to care for her ailing mother and to protect her children. She rose early to take us to school, caressed us tenderly, and went off to labor at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory, then performed countless household chores. But how often did I sit down, look into her eyes, and ask her how her day was, much less ask her about her deepest cares? How seldom had I, even when circumstances became brighter for us, sat down and looked at her? Now it was too late. The seconds had gone, never to return, just as the rabbi had warned. I had missed too many opportunities.

  I still cannot explain to my own satisfaction why, at this awful juncture, it was this loss of time that sprang initially to my mind. But it did, and with great force. I suppose the mind, below the level of consciousness, has its own operational logic. A few months earlier, in physics class, we had discussed energy and light, mass and acceleration. Now my own light was gone. The physics formulae were all wrong: for me, light was no longer energy but had become time. I had no more time. It seemed to me that my problem was not about darkness or about blindness but about the loss of seconds.

  Even though the metal pads had been removed, I became conscious of something like a dark-gray, impenetrable metal door on my eyes. From within I could “see” that door, because there was something on it that attracted my notice. There, dancing before me, were a multitude of patterns and configurations. Some of the ephemeral little figures and patterns were gray. Others were black or white. I shook my head in an attempt to clear them.

  Those initial postoperative images did dissipate after a while, but they had pointed me toward a new way of perceiving the world. I had in effect begun the process of understanding that in my consciousness I would be able to construct images of the faces of the people with whom I spoke—the pigment of their skin, the shape of their eyes, noses, mouths—and the layout of a room, its depths, texture, and volume; and images of nature—the sky, the shapes of the clouds, the sunset. Thus, I vaguely sensed even in those early moments without eyesight that I might become able to view things without the contamination of the ugly.

  Despite this discovery, I was not ready to be blind. Who would be? So began my slide.

  They brought me food, but I would not eat. As a precaution, they cleaned out my medicine cabinet—took my razor and blades and left the bathroom barren. That first night, I took the sleeping pill I had been given and went to sleep. My restless dreams, more like nightmares, were punctuated by the recurring image of that blind beggar in the market in Buffalo a dozen years earlier. He was laughing at me, his head and chest thrown back, his unseeing eyes facing the sky.
Dr. Sugar’s words—“Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow”—repeated themselves over and over.

  Those images and memories were soon replaced by a new one that was also to repeat itself often in my dreams during those early weeks: a large white placard with black letters reading “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.” Was some covert logic making connections deep in my mind? The message was a brave yet futile denial but one that was later to be transposed into a determination to be blind on my own terms. That imperative, while mad, turned out not to be futile.

  The following day the hospital’s rabbi, Rabbi Bakst—a kind, humble man—came to tell me about King Solomon’s call for every jeweler in the land to bring forth the most precious ring. Despite seeing rings encrusted with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, Solomon selected a plain gold band engraved with the Hebrew letters gimel, zayin, and yud—Gam zeh ya’avor—“This too shall pass.” The inspirational story had little of its intended effect on me.

  Unannounced, a childhood friend, Sandy Hoffman, a junior at the University of Michigan, barreled through the door of my room. Jovial and loquacious, he had driven to Detroit to visit me. His sprawling arms and large hands had often challenged me in basketball. He halted inside the door, obviously taken aback. I sensed his usually optimistic bearing quickly receding. My mother moved to greet him, and he flung his arms around her. She was extremely fond of him, often referring to him as her third son. But as I lay prone, hair disheveled, eyes moist with medication staring pointlessly upward, I extended no greeting to my friend. He moved slowly toward me, gently raised my bare right forearm, and placed it against his chest. At first he did not speak, but then, as though nothing had happened since I had seen him the previous fall, he blurted out, “How are you?” I did not respond.

  “When am I going to whip you in basketball?”