Today i told the doctor that i saw flashes of light when i closed my eyes. He said that was a bad thing, that meant the
meat part of my eyes was
ripping away on the inside, that i could go blind, that meant i couldn't see, you see...and he sent me to the hospital, by taxi even, because it was that urgent. On the way in the taxi driving past
Mt Royal cemetary and the
terraced houses with the wroughtiron railings and to this big hospital and I am looking at everything thinking maybe it'll all suddenly just black out like a
cathode-ray tube and the world suddenly getting smaller and smaller receding like a dot in the distance until i never see it again. And I got out of the taxi and went into the emergency room to see the triage nurse and i walked in and i saw a guy in a wheelchair and an old guy with a young guy propping him up and a
madwoman but no one was bleeding. the nurse finished writing down all the particulars of
the lady she was with who like me wasn't apparently sick. She pointed at me and I said "
detatched retinas" which was all the doctor said I would have to say and she beckoned me over and I sat there and told her my particulars, and then she told me to go wait again so I did.
After a while i got to see the doctor. But first I had to sit on a bed and wait for him.
There was a lady in the bed beside me and she was another madwoman. She was asking the doctor for a shot of anything to make her feel better. The doctor tried to calm her down but eventually shouted at her and went over to me. I said "detatched retinas" again. He flashed his light into my eyes but said that I needed to go to the special machine. I had to go wait in another part of the hospital, down a corridor and left and down another corridor again and then I'd find it.
I found it. I waited. Another doctor put drops into my eyes and said I had to put my chin on the bar. He turned the machine on and shone a light around the inside of both my eyes. I could see the inside of my eyes as he did it, tendrils of blood vessels ricocheting in gleams of incandescence.
Then he told me I was fine.