Doug Monroe's OPENLY OLD

The Blind Leading the Blind

My retina specialist stuck a needle in my left eye last week. That’s the bad eye, the one going blind faster than the good eye. The doctor’s staff got me ready by giving me eye tests and squeezing in drops to numb the eye.

The doctor came into the room and fist-bumped me in greeting. The centerpiece was the chair, which reclines. A bright light hovered above me. An assistant pecked away wildly at a computer, which displayed big pictures of my macula, with its bubble of fluid.

The doctor reclined the chair and inserted a clamp like the ones Alex got in “A Clockwork Orange” to keep the eyelid open and then bingo. A quick jab.

A small black circle formed in the eye and floated around. It goes away in a couple of hours. I also got tiny black floaters. I usually think they are bugs.

I’ll go back in a few weeks for a shot in my right eye. In perpetuity.

Why?

The injections are the standard treatment for Age-Related Macular Degeneration, a condition I inherited from my father, Augustus Currie Monroe, who went virtually blind from the disease in his late eighties.

About five years ago, my ophthalmologist noticed the dangerous fluid buildup in the macula of my left eye. He sent me across the street to the retina specialist. A while later the specialist saw the disease in my right eye. I get one eye shot at a time so I can drive myself home and take a nap. I live in Athens, so it’s not a long drive.

The Retina Doctor

The doctor is a good guy. We chat a bit about movies, like “Sinners.” He’s from India and we discuss reincarnation. He said he might have served me in some capacity in a past life and that could be why he is serving me now.

Cool.

I’ve believed in reincarnation since I experienced a couple of past lives while doing Holographic Breathwork with Dr. Stanislav Groff, a Czech psychiatrist who was an early LSD advocate. He moved to Big Sur, California, and developed his breathwork as a drug-free way to experience altered states. I met Stan during a retreat in 2012 in Menla Mountain, a Buddhist retreat near Woodstock, New York.

Over the years, I’ve learned more about eye injections from Dr. Google. Some medical websites claim the procedure doesn’t hurt, but it can hurt like hell when the numbing drops wear off.

For God’s sake, the man stuck a needle in my eye!

I’m always surprised at how many old people are jammed into the waiting room. Thirty chairs are filled with the elderly, all crumpled up and wrinkled and bewildered with canes and walkers and spouses, adult children, and caregivers. A nursing home van pulled into the parking lot ahead of me the other day and a caregiver wheeled an ancient man into the waiting room. He must have been in his late 90s. All bones, wrinkled skin, and vacant eyes. He sat quietly in his wheelchair, staring at nothing.

Some of these people are so old I wouldn’t be surprised if they dug up Zombies to give eye shots. I thought of the haunting line by Chuck Palahniuk: “These old people. These human ruins.”

The Eyes Get Worse

The shots don’t improve your vision, the doctor says. They are supposed to keep my eyes from getting worse. But they do get worse. He’s using a new stronger medicine in the left eye. I saw it advertised on YouTube and wanted to scream.

AMD is the leading cause of blindness for old people in America. Dr. Google says there are ways to improve AMD-diminished vision, such as Yoga or Qi Gong for the eyes, red light therapy, or stem cell therapy in Mexico. A friend who lives in Canada just got back from Puerto Vallarta after getting stem cells injected beside his eyes. Cost -- $4,000, plus travel. I don’t think it worked. He has dry AMD. I have the wet kind.

I had plenty of experience with AMD before I ever got it

The Old Man

A friend’s elderly father lost most of his vision from AMD. He lived alone and cooked simple meals of canned food that a neighbor brought him. My friend moved out of town and asked me to take his father to an eye doctor at Emory. I still lived in Atlanta back then and spent the night at the old man’s little cottage in Marietta. He was divorced for the eighth time and had a knack for talking women who came to his door into taking off their clothes. Even church ladies. Especially church ladies. He had an entire album of Polaroids to prove it.

After he put away the album, hee told me about the night his other son was killed in a car wreck in Marietta in 1968.

In the morning, I helped him to my car. He fell on slick leaves while getting in and I lifted him to his feet. “Well, that’s just about the end,” he said. At Emory, his doctor said there wasn’t much he could do for the old man because a jackleg optometrist had zapped his eyes with laser treatments that didn’t work.

After the appointment, I took him to visit my father at an assisted living home in Decatur, near Emory. They were the same age and had both been to Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean. My dad was a civil engineer for the Air Force and my friend’s dad was a decorated World War Two gunner in the Army Air Force. Both were losing their hearing as well as their vision and ended up saying, “What?” “How’s that?” My friend’s dad declined to go to the dining room for lunch because he didn’t want anyone to see him eat.

On the way home, he described my father: “He looked old.”

I led him into his cottage and he collapsed into his bed from sheer exhaustion. I went back to work. My friend and I frequently discussed our fathers. My dad didn’t age so much as rot. He lived in assisted living for 10 years, got moved to a nursing home for a while, and was kicked out of two hospices for not dying. I told my sister, “He’s growing new organs, like a frog.”

My friend called me a few weeks after my visit to his father to tell me his dad had been rushed to a hospital with pain in his stomach. My friend flew down and said his dad had an inoperable tumor and was moved to hospice. He died the first night there. “He won the lottery,” my friend said with a laugh that turned to tears.

Daddy’s Eyes

Before my parents moved into assisted living, they lived in a nice house beside a lake in Stone Mountain. But they were hoarders and let a feral cat piss on the kitchen floor. Daddy just tossed litter on each new puddle to “sop it up.” He sat in a recliner and sipped bourbon. Mama spent a lot of time in bed reading the National Enquirer and eating tomato sandwiches.

My sister, Trisha Monroe Campbell, and I took turns taking them Sunday dinner. One Sunday, my father mentioned he was going to his eye doctor the next day.

“Dad, I’ll take you to the doctor,” I said. “What time is your appointment.”

“I don’t need a ride,” he said.

“Dad, you can’t drive without eyes,” I said.

“I know the way,” he said.

I won and took him. A few weeks later he said he needed to get his Georgia driver’s license renewed.

The Driver’s License

“Dad, there is no way in Hell you can get a new driver’s license,” I said.

But he insisted he could get it, almost as if he had been studying the Power of Positive Thinking or the Law of Attraction.

I thought it might be fun. We went to the tiny DMV office on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, next door to “Murder Kroger.” The office was closed for lunch so we went across the street to The Local, where my son used to work. Now, he’s a Philadelphia lawyer.

Daddy got a barbecue sandwich and a beer. I got a sandwich and a Coke. I told him how much fun I had as a kid when he took me to the old Ponce de Leon Ballpark to see the Atlanta Crackers play baseball, just a few blocks west of where we ate.

My most memorable game was seeing Dad strike up a conversation with a muscular young Black man sitting in front of us. This was the year the Crackers were a St. Louis Cardinals farm team.

The young man was Bob Gibson, who went on to become a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cards. I had never seen my father speak to a Black person before. Dad was born in 1918 in the sandhills of North Carolina and was a stone racist, but he always voted for Democrats, even Rep. Cynthia McKinney.

After lunch, we went back to the DMV office. A line stretched outside. Inside, only one frantic young woman handled all the functions. The line seemed to be moving quickly. I wondered how Dad would accept the inevitable and go home without a new license.

A Miracle

As we got inside the office, I noticed something. Something incredible. Something beyond belief. It seemed as if the heavens opened above us. When I realized what was happening, I was slack-jawed with shock. I tried my best not to burst into laughter.

To speed up the line, the young woman had stopped giving eye tests.

She was not going to give an eye test to my nearly blind father, who could barely see out of the sides of his eyes.

She asked Dad some questions and got him to sign something, She took his picture. And she printed out his new driver’s license. He grabbed it with his shaky old hands and put it into his worn-out wallet.

He was street-legal.

We walked back to my car and his grin stretched all the way to Stone Mountain. We laughed as hard as we did when we watched Ernie Kovacs on our black and white TV.

Not long after that, Daddy fell on the driveway and hit his head. He crawled to the porch and collapsed there, his knees bleeding from the concrete. A neighbor called an ambulance. He went to the hospital and then moved to assisted living with Mama. He never drove again.

Dad died in 2011 at the age of 93. I still have his last driver’s license.

This June, I renewed my own driver’s license. I passed the eye test.