The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. (24 page)

I am a pregnant woman. Can you please scare the hell out of me?

Sure. The birth of grotesquely abnormal fetuses is a rarity, but it is common enough that there are dozens of clinical Latin medical terms for fetal monsters. Most are born dead. Here are the top ten:

Harlequin:
Looks like a hippopotamus. Skin is covered with thick, horny scales and plates.

Acephalobrachia:
Lacks both arms and a head.

Cephalomelus:
Arm or leg protrudes from head.

Cephalothoracopagus:
Twins united at the head and neck and chest.

Cryptodidymus:
Twins in which one fetus is hidden entirely within the body of the other.

Hemicephalus:
Half a brain.

Hemiacephalus:
No brain.

Holocardius amorphus:
A blob.

Holocardius acephafus:
No heart, head, or chest.

Holocardius acormus:
Just a head.

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Unless you give birth to something else. A fabulous 1896 book I found,
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,
reports the case of a woman who experienced a full-term pregnancy and then gave birth to a worm. This book is filled with dubious, poorly documented case histories that should be given little credence, including the case, in Paris in 1830, in which a woman gave birth to a child with three buttocks.

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Contractions are that physiological process wherein a woman's cervix is dilated preparatory to birth, through hours of excruciating rhythmic pain. When you think about it, this is a highly inefficient system for what is supposedly a completely natural process. It is as though God actually made a mistake.
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It is as though every time you swallowed food, it caused a searing pain in the eye.

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Other notable mistakes by God: menstruation, nipples on men, the need to “wipe.”

Things That Can Take Out an Eye

Go to the bathroom
and get your toothbrush. Open your right eye. Now, using a vigorous side-to-side motion, brush your eyeball.

You didn't do it, did you? People are squeamish about their eyes, particularly hypochondriacs. Hypochondriacs do not think of the eyeball as just another organ. They think of it as an extremely vulnerable object that, in a disastrous design error, was placed right out in front of the body, as though Toyota accidentally made the bumper of the Corolla out of Limoges. Hypochondriacs think the eye is like a water balloon and that any puncture of it will result in a sickening pop, a gush of viscous fluids, and permanent blindness.

Don't worry. The eyeball is more like a firm green grape. Try an experiment. Get a firm green grape. Now take a pin. Puncture it. See, it does not explode! Now take a razor and slit the grape horizontally, about halfway through. See? Just a little leakage. It sort of looks like Oscar the Grouch!
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In fact, the eye sometimes behaves
like one of those self-healing tires, which repair their own punctures.

OK, still with me? Now, take the grape and sit on it.

My point is, don't press your luck. The eye is not indestructible. Though a simple, small puncture won't usually kill it, trauma with a blunt object will.

Remember how your sainted mom always issued dire warnings about things that could take out an eye, such as BBs from Daisy air rifles, darts, rocks, and harpoons? Well, we mean no offense, but your sainted mom was an idiot. These things sometimes took out eyes, but less often than you might think, precisely because everyone
expected
them to take out eyes and approached them with a basic degree of caution. The things that
actually
take out eyes are far more interesting.

Below is a list of actual things that have recently taken out an eye, compiled exclusively for this book by the Helen Keller Eye Research Foundation
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in Birmingham, Alabama:

1. A chicken beak.
   

2. A turnip, pulled from the ground in a reckless manner.
   

3. A supermarket laser scanner. The customer apparently placed his eye on the glass for a look-see.
   

4. A pine cone falling from a tree on a recumbent person.
   

To this list, I would have to add hog slop and potato bazookas. I did not know about these things until recently, when I spoke with Dr. Lorenz Zimmerman, a famous eye pathologist in Washington, D.C., who has studied eye injuries and knows a million of them. He mentioned one tragic case in which a farmer got some hog slop in his eye. Hog slop is not produced with the fastidiousness one might associate with the production of, say, a vial of tetracycline. The eye got infected and the farmer went blind. The most lurid case Dr. Zimmerman knew of occurred in upstate
New York a couple of years ago. It was a classic potato bazooka incident.

A potato bazooka is a highly scientific homemade weapon that makes use of the volatility of hair spray and the structural integrity of PVC pipe to launch a potato the length of a football field. Potato bazookas are sometimes used by bucktoothed morons to hunt rabbit or squirrel. In this case, the individual apparently attempted to utilize this instrument in his living room. Alcohol was involved.

To better understand the vast array of things that can go wrong with your vision, it might be instructive to review How the Eye Works.

When we were in grade school, we learned the eye works by bringing an idea to a committee, which schedules public hearings in a timely fashion. Or possibly that is How a Bill Becomes a Law. Now that I think of it, we learned that the eye works like a camera. Recently I discovered that this is basically true. This came as a shock because most of what we were taught in grade school involved preposterous oversimplifications, due to the standard textbook requirement of reducing everything to simple numbered lists that can be memorized. (Reasons for World War II: 1. Hitler, 2. economy, 3. naval superiority, 4. Asia.) So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that, indeed, the eye works like a camera.

The image comes in through the lens, and it is projected back through the vitreous humor
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onto the retina. You cannot see your retina any more than you can taste your tongue, but you can sort of see what your retina looks like when an ophthalmologist shines a bright light on it and you see a reflection. It is a tangle
of capillaries against a sea of angry pink flesh. It is interesting that whatever you are looking at—a vista of breathtaking natural beauty, the face of a loved one beckoning to you in soft seduction—is processed through this screen that looks like highway raccoon viscera. Plus, the image is reflected upside down:

The Eye

The two most common eye problems are nearsightedness and farsightedness, which are caused by minor defects in the shape of the eyeball. The normal eyeball is 23.5 millimeters long. The nearsighted one is longer; the farsighted one is shorter. How can you tell if you are nearsighted or farsighted? One way would be to pop out your eyeball with a soup spoon and measure it. A better method would be to go to a mirror and look at your face, specifically that portion of your face visible behind your glasses. If it looks as though your head has been immersed in pickle brine for several years until it got as small as an egg, then you are nearsighted. If your eyes look huge, like one of those paintings by famed 1960s incompetent Walter Keane, then you are farsighted.

I am nearsighted. Once, for about forty-five minutes, I thought this was a blessing. At the time, I was lying on the floor of a small cabin in Vermont on a cold winter day. Inches before me was a glass of claret, nearly empty, its stem sunk deep into the russet pile of the carpet. The orange flush of a roaring fire was dancing on the belly of the glass. It was beautiful, and it was all I saw clearly. The rest of the room was a warm blur. I felt alone in an elegant old photograph, a tintype with softened borders.

I had removed my eyeglasses and could not see anything to mar the elegance of that scene. I couldn't see the toilet in the distance. I couldn't see the unmade bed. I couldn't see the pizza box with the ruins of dinner. At this moment, my world was a blissful distortion of closeness. Also, I was pitifully drunk.

I contemplated my great good fortune. Only the nearsighted could truly understand the comforting intimacy of their affliction, I thought. Only the nearsighted can remove their glasses and he suddenly, profoundly alone with the hook they are reading or the person they are loving. As I lay there on the cabin floor, I felt inspired. I would write a book. It would be an ode to imperfect vision, a work of art, of poetry. A title leapt to mind:
Myopia Utopia.

The fire died out. I drifted off to sleep, flushed with wine and wisdom.

In the morning I awoke and changed my mind. That is because once I got my glasses on I could see that while I had lain there, enraptured, planning my literary coup, a huge ember from the fire had leapt out and plopped onto the floor not ten feet away. Right before my eyes, it had slowly sizzled a four-inch hole through the carpet and into the floorboards. I had to pay the innkeeper extravagantly for the damage. I did not write the book.

In the last twenty years, medical science has developed a surgical procedure called “radial keratotomy” to cure defects in vision. The procedure is relatively simple, if terrifying: The outer lining of the eye, called the cornea, is cut by knife or laser and re-shaped to compensate for a misshapen eyeball. The operation corrects bad vision, particularly myopia.

My friend Karl recently went to a doctor to inquire about radial keratotomy. Karl has been myopic his whole life and is sick of it. He was concerned about the pros and cons of the procedure, possibly because places that do radial keratotomy make you sign elaborate waivers, thick forms that look like what you used to have to fill out to obtain airline flight insurance, where it listed potential damages with unnerving specificity, such as “$200,000 for the loss of one arm, both legs, and one ovary; $205,000 for the loss of one arm, both legs, and
both
ovaries,” etc.

Karl wanted reassurance. He wanted to be convinced of the doctor's professionalism. So he sat down with her and inquired about the risks of the procedure.

The doctor told him that the only conceivable danger is that the operation cuts away about 10 percent of the cornea of the eye.

“And …?” Karl asked.

The doctor leaned forward. “Well, have you ever been in a bar?”

“Yes,” Karl said.

“Well, imagine that the guy next to you is drunk, and gets nasty, and he takes a beer bottle and smashes it against the bar, and then swings at your face with the broken bottle.”

“OK,” Karl said.

“Well, imagine that he strikes you in the eye.”

“OK,” Karl said.

“Well, you will have ten percent less protection against eye injury.”

Karl waited. Just silence.

“That's it?” Karl said.

“That's it.”

“So,” Karl asked, “what is your advice?”