That vulture-like eye’s message from beyond

by Nellie Curtiss ….

It’s one of those serendipitous moments or one of those “down from the mountain with the tablets” moments, one of those “don’t fool with mother nature” moments or even one of those “I was sleeping out in the desert for 40 winks” moments.

A few years back, considering the caustic pain on the eyeball and head aches that followed when I tried to navigate a highway with snow-shine over the desert reflecting louder than a flash mob singing with mirrors in the Mall of America or somehow all snowshoeing and signaling across the Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the relief was incalculable.

Before the relief, there was a growing awareness of a “log jam” in my eye around the outlier of the white ball continually growing red veins like a nightmare in a sandstorm might be portrayed.  It started small like sandy grit, which is common in these years and ions of sand blasting across the Valley floor and across the shedding hair of the buffalo. 

With no wash station at hand, I grabbed for one eye drop for itchy relief and another for relief of the gritty feeling.  I washed, washed my hands again and tried to increase humidity in the living room by boiling eggs and so releasing moisture into the air.  There was no going outside with the blizzard throwing lawn chairs about the dirt road.

I began to understand how the lion might have felt before St. Jerome removed the thorn from his paw; or the how the lion with Androcles from Aesop’s Fables felt when he could not chase after the one who escaped. 

It wasn’t pretty, this eye of mine.  Maybe it was turning into the Poe eye, that vulture-like eye from the Tell-Tale-Heart.  This development was heavy.  It was heavy like avalanche cement on a body strewn down from a mountain or the claws of a bald eagle on a scampering meal in the sage.

Now, I was concerned that this disaster of an eye that no makeup would help – if I had worn makeup, that is—might be conjunctivitis or Pink Eye!  Standing in one of several optometrists’ offices, I related my experience and how it had been coming on for three weeks, at least. The technicians escorted me into the glaucoma machine.  No glaucoma was present.  Then a look for disease: no disease noted.

At last, I met the eye doctor who examined both my eyes and the eye that screamed at me.  He used that large eye scope and swung the arm so I could place my chin and forehead comfortably in the saddles where he could then use a magnifying scope to see deep into my eyes.

No growth was found; no sand or grit; but there was an eyelash!  A lower lid eyelash was in-grown – it was growing into my eyeball, he said.  After he sterilized special tweezers, he promptly removed the log of an eyelash. Voila, I was free of pain! And the eyelash in the lower eyeball had generated pain at the top of the eyeball – low or high, the pain dissolved with that one precision pluck.

It was then at that moment that I realized I was self-aware, and more importantly “other aware,” and began to understand a message from beyond: Why bother with the spec in your neighbor’s eye when you have a log or plank in your own?

— Nellie Curtiss is a retired college educator and long-time local columnist. Reach her at columnsbynellie.com or email her at columnsbynellie@gmail.com