Mayonnaise

I FaceTimed recently with a friend who has suffered from low vision all her life. It wasn't until she was a middle-aged adult that a doctor finally declared her legally blind, though she probably could have qualified much earlier. Up until very recently, with the use of adaptive technology, she could see super-enlarged type on the computer, make her own meals, and even do a bit of quilting. Though she hasn't been able to drive in years, she's been able to live relatively independently with some help from part-time caregivers and delivery services. That changed a few weeks ago when an ocular migraine further clouded her already shaky vision. 

She told me it feels like someone suddenly put mayonnaise over what was left of her sight. Now the light gets in through a white translucence, and there are shapes, shadows, things in motion, but when it comes right down to it she can't see. She just can't see. And she lives alone. It's terrifying.

My friend is seeking treatment, but appointment wait-times are long, and she has to arrange for transportation, which is not so easy in the rural/suburban community where she lives. She can't just call Uber or even a taxi service, and she hasn't the means, nor the desire to move to a place where such things are ubiquitous. Even if she could summon a car, her limited, fixed income would make using such services prohibitive, and the free services available to people with disability tend to be erratic in their scheduling.

Oh, and there's a pandemic, which makes all of that more complicated and worse. Of course.

So we talk about mayonnaise and make offensive blind jokes and cancer jokes to keep our spirits up. We also reminisce about that time decades ago, in school, when we thought we could do or be anything we wanted, which for us meant having lifelong careers in academe, enormous private libraries in our houses, and scholarly projects that required sabbaticals in the south of France. Instead, we're adorably chunky, late-middle-aged, learned women living creatively on slender means and making awful jokes about awful situations over a video-link like dystopic Jetsons.

I say to her "My brain feels like it's been mayonnaised." Every thought is slippery and cloudy. Cancer people call it chemo-brain, or brain fog, but I like my friend's simile better—mayonnaise being in places it shouldn't ever go. I have never liked mayonnaise, never willingly put it on sandwiches, won't eat salads made with it, etc. I even skipped the mayonnaise in France, where I've visited twice, and where, I'm told, it's particularly good.

So that's my advice. Skip the mayonnaise. Definitely don't put it in your eyes or your brains if you can help it. And don't get cancer or blindness. Or coronavirus. Stay as well as you are able, lovelies. I like being here with you, even in a pandemic.