Love and First Sight(33)
I go to the operation prep area, and Mom and I sit down, me on the hospital bed. A nurse slides a curtain around us, the hooks grinding along their track on the ceiling until the fabric surrounds us like a little bubble, dampening slightly the sounds from the rest of the room—soft voices, whirring machines, beeping monitors. Several different people cycle through, asking me a bunch of questions to make sure I’m not allergic to anesthesia, that I don’t have a history of breathing problems, I haven’t eaten in the last twelve hours, and on and on. Each question implies a potential complication, something that could go wrong. And these aren’t even issues related to eyesight; they are just the general risks of surgery. I’m starting to wonder if maybe Dad was right, maybe there are too many risks here, and I can feel my heart racing as they put the IV in my arm. Then I start to feel really good, just relaxed and calm. Mom strokes my hair like I’m five years old, but I don’t even care, because I feel wonderful and I love my mom.
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The next thing I know, I am waking up, the beeps and whirs slowly coming back to life in my awareness.
“Honey?” says Mom, apparently noticing I’m awake from the movements of my hands (it’s not like she can see my eyes opening after all, not with these bandages over them). “How do you feel?”
I feel great. Pain meds are awesome. I should have surgery more often.
“Fine,” I say.
It’s an outpatient surgery so Mom drives me home that afternoon. Over the weekend, I just chill. As the medicine wears off, my eyes start to hurt more and Mom’s doting starts to get annoying, so I spend most of the weekend in my room, poking around the Internet on my laptop.
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During morning announcements the next Monday at school, Xander reveals that the schoolwide votes have been tallied for the first round of auditions. Tripp and Connor are eliminated. Cecily and I advance. We have our second and final audition Friday.
Mrs. Everbrook gives Cecily and me a copy of the script in advance, and we spend the week practicing so we can memorize it ahead of time instead of reading it on air. Unlike the first audition, where we just sat behind the desk, the next one includes a green-screen segment.
Victoria hosts that segment for Xander and herself, standing in front of a green wall that, Cecily explains, runs through a computer that makes the background look like something else. Apparently it’s the same technology meteorologists use on television to show maps of weather patterns. It all means nothing to me. For now.
Xander wraps up their audition with a reminder to cast votes for their favorite pair of hosts during lunch. The winners will be announced in a few weeks. Then it’s our turn. Cecily begins with a few announcements from the desk and then tosses to me at the green screen, where I’m standing wearing my usual sunglasses. No one knows the bandages underneath are from a surgery that may soon result in eyesight. For now, I’m still just the blind kid. I launch into my thirty-second explanation of the upcoming school renovations. A series of floor-plan diagrams is appearing behind me, and I point out different areas as I speak.
“A little higher, now to the left—perfect,” says Cecily in my ear.
Last night we decided that I should be the one to do the green-screen segment. Because it’s the exact opposite of what everyone would expect. The blind kid standing in front of a green wall—a color he’s never even seen—and gesturing at imaginary pictures as if he knows where they are. It seems like the perfect trick to get people talking about us, and maybe even voting for us, too.
Just as we practiced yesterday at his house, Whitford gave me a wireless earpiece that he said looks something like a hearing aid. From off camera, Cecily turned her television mic off and turned on another hidden mic that sends a signal to the device in my ear. That way she could direct my hand movements as I recited the script, and all the while I look like I know where I’m pointing. Pretty clever, right? We thought so.
At lunch everyone agrees that we nailed the audition. But the winners won’t be announced for a few more weeks. By then, I will have already had my second operation. Or not, depending on whether they find a cornea donor. My future, or more specifically the future of my eyesight, lies with the destiny of one unfortunate organ donor. Somewhere out there right now, presumably, is a healthy person looking through a pair of functional corneas with no idea of the future that awaits him. I wonder what he’s looking at right now. A spreadsheet at work? A documentary on Netflix? The cracks in a sidewalk? He could never imagine that in a matter of days, someone else will be looking through those very same eyes. Or maybe it’s a she. Either way, something calamitous will have to occur in order for those corneas to become available to me. Is it wrong for me to hope for such a thing?
CHAPTER 16
The weeks tick by slowly. First I have to wait a month for the stem cells to (hopefully) be accepted by my body and begin to replicate into daughter cells. I still go to school, do my journalism work, hang out with my friends, and sometimes with just Cecily. But I never really feel completely there because in the front of my mind, right behind my eyes, in fact, is the uncertainty of my future. After the month of healing is up, it’s a waiting game. There’s a two-week window in which I can receive a transplant. If no corneas become available, game over. The procedure fails. So the wait is painful, that buzzing anxiety even louder in my mind. It’s tough to concentrate at school or on my homework. They seem so mundane compared with the breathless narrative of my mind. I sit in my room and jump at the slightest sound, hoping it’s the telephone with the call from Dr. Bianchi’s office. Finally, after almost two weeks, just as my window is closing, the call comes. A donor has been found. My corneas are en route.