Outside Eye

Hello all. This is Andy, Genevra's husband. She asked me to write her blog entry tonight as she's currently sitting in a hospital bed in St. Louis awaiting emergency surgery on her eye.

It's been a day.

The first alarm was rung this morning when Genevra called me frantically from downstairs. When you have children, this happens often, but it always feels like you're running in quicksand to get to the emergency. Today's first emergency: Ariana's ear. It was swollen, red and pointing almost sideways. There she was, naked in the bath, smiling carelessly, her mop of a hairdo finally wet and revealing her giganimous ear. "Look at it," Genevra remarked, sproinging it down gently. "Is it broken? Can ears break?"

After a lengthy game of charades during which we tried to ascertain what happened to Ari, we're pretty sure she told us that something bit her. I'm thinking spider, maybe? Genevra's thinking brown recluse. This is motherhood.

We called the doctor and not long after I saw Genevra off to work this morning Ari was in his office being examined. He's not sure what happened but an insect bite isn't out of the question. He prescribed a topical and oral antibiotic and Ari and I then ran off and had a great day together tooling around the mall, playing on 75-cent mall rides and eating lunch at the food court. (She was thrilled to be drinking a non-watered down bottle of orange juice and was so very careful with it--as if to prove she was a big enough girl to handle it and would love to do it again sometime.)

The middle of the day went like most do. I put Ari down for her nap and got to work on my writing.

Genevra called at 3-something from her eye doctor appointment. She had been seeing some ghosting that troubled her, I think on Wednesday. After she discovered that her contacts were not the cause of the problem on Thursday, she made an appointment for today.

Come to find out she has a detached retina. This is serious and if left unchecked can lead to blindness in a matter of days (and we're already at three days and counting,) so her eye doctor recommended surgery at once in order to "save the eye." The nearest chap who fixes up eyes is in St. Louis, which is 2 1/2 hours away.

I'm at home because someone needed to put Ari to sleep, because I'm a father now and I have to make decisions like this, and because Genevra's friend Becky (the kind of friend who shows up on moving day) was able to put down everything and drive her to the hospital.

The procedure she's having is called a scleral buckling.

You really can't tell from reading all of Genevra's posts that her life has been difficult lately. The sorrow that I'm sharing with you today isn't just about Genevra's brush with blindness, it's that this brush with blindness has punctuated several months of stressful work, school, family and health problems that have left us shaking our heads and wondering which god she's offended.

Please, if you believe in such things, if you're inclined to do such things, put her in your thoughts, prayers, blessings. She believes in the power of prayer. And I guess when I'm really honest with myself, so do I. I just don't like to admit it.

Genevra, honey, I love you. I'm with you.