A moment before, she had let us know that something was up while Gabriel occupied himself with eleventy bajillion dollar equipment she uses for eye exams. She showed us the scans of his eyes and the accompanying data on each eye. One measured something with a 1.50 and the other a 6.75 - a stark discrepancy. "Broken," though, for its simplicity to the ears and experience of a four-year-old sent palpable chills through mum and dad. I gave into to the urge to caution him to stop playing with the precision equipment, only to have the opto-expert chide me with, "Chill out, Dad," soon to be reused by my preschooler with some regularity, I'm sure. We booked another appointment to confirm the issue while I tried to recall the occasion where his reluctance to use his left eye presaged his efforts to get his right eye out from the shield she used for today's single-eye tests of his vision.
Mom's face reddened and eyes moistened. I was stoic and tried to joke about it. There is expectation that it'll correct itself with the proposed intervention of eyeglasses and further hope that he will take to wearing his glasses as I do.
The walk home was somber and I pondered the restaurants we passed as a respite to stop and change the atmosphere. I passed, conscious that my appetite for sushi - the first option to present itself - surpassed that of my fish-phobic wife. I was not in the mood for the daily ritual of pulling Gabriel by the hand and running as hard as I could to drag him and his scrambling legs in my wake. It was only after some insistence that I relented and tugged him along. Even Mum trotted along.
It is not the first time we have had a medical issue that sent us reeling to worst case scenario. Before he turned 3 months old, we learned that there were concerns about how his hips were aligning and he spent several months in a hips brace that kept his legs splayed until there was confidence that they were settling into their sockets the way they should. We know it could be worse and we ponder that aloud in first world problem terms as we acknowledge that we caught it and can intervene, and that elsewhere in the world, children do not have opto-experts near at hand and insisting on annual visits.
Gabriel is oblivious to his issue as far as we can tell. I moved his Toys R Us Lego catalogue to his left side so that he might use his weaker eye a little more. I also recall Gabriel's first evasion of his left eye. When I first introduced him to the SLR camera last month he peered through the viewfinder with his right eye and repelled my efforts to get to his left eye, the more balanced posture with a camera. It was of little comfort to recall that.
The rest of the night unfolded as it usually does and I mustered the goofiness to try to read the first few pages of book to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" until the cadence mercifully veered away from that melody. Gabriel demanded that I keep singing the book that way there was nothing resembling the chorus. (Whew.) If I write a children's book maybe I'll set it to the melody of "Everlong."
We have, for the moment gone from grief to acceptance and we'll return to the opto-expert next Wednesday to flirt with denial and bargaining for a few moments before our charming little daredevil becomes bespectacled.
