betaphilings

Lack of imagination is the cause of much human suffering.

I never knew Dr. Guisenberger’s story. I only imagined it. For decades I imagined his story. He was the hot coal in my shoe. I hated him and feared him and blamed him for turning me into a freak.

Over time my anger subsided as a new story began to emerge. The new story was imagined too. In the new, more sympathetic version of the story, Dr. Guisenberger was not an evil monster but a tortured soul, reeling from the horrors of his place in time, a damaged fragment of his former self.

It’s funny, really, how you can look at anything in different ways. One with loathing, one with compassion.

In the old story I was convinced that he hated me because my eyes were blue. I felt that he was using me to exact a morbid kind of personal revenge.  That might have been the case, but I cannot look at it that way any longer. Now I must view Dr. Guisenberger as a pathetic, broken man who had known untold horrors in his homeland. Whether that was true or not, I do not know. I only know that he was psychically sick. In my new version of the story, it was the Holocaust that made him sick.

If one needed glasses back then, one went to Dr. Guisenberger’s office.

“Is this better or worse?” he would ask.

I never knew for sure. I always guessed and I always guessed wrong.

It did not seem to matter to him whether I guessed correctly or not. All he wanted was an answer. If I said I didn’t know, he would persist.

“Of course you know. Which is it, better or worse?”

I trembled in fear of this man for ten years. Twice a year for ten years I was forced to sit in his dark, dank room and smell his coffee breath in my face and say things I did not believe. Twice a year for ten years I would leave his office with a prescription for new lenses that were stronger than the ones I wore.

“Mom, I can’t see.”

“You’ll get used to them.”

“But I can’t see!”

“The doctor knows what’s best.”

Never once did her words comfort me, nor for a moment did I get used to the burden placed on me by my elders. No one knew what to do when I cried with each new pair of glasses.

As the lenses got stronger, the headaches worsened. My childhood was a blur of headaches and heartache.

By the time I reached high school, my lenses resembled Coke bottle bottoms. By the time I graduated, Dr. Guisenberger’s version of my vision had reached a whopping 20/1000.

According to Wikipedia, 20/1000 is considered near total visual impairment, or near total blindness.

I felt betrayed by the adults in my life. I felt that they had allowed near blindness to be forced on me by a black-souled German Jew who had it out for me and my little brother. Yes, he too, my precious little brother, was dealt this same exact blow.

No one in my extended family had low vision, yet somehow my brother and I got labeled nearly blind. That alone is reason to believe the doctor over corrected us. Also, there was that little girl whose innate sense of awareness kept insisting something was wrong.

Were my brother and I deliberately blinded by a demented victim of Nazi terror? Maybe. Maybe not. There is no way to know.

In my earlier version of the story, his actions were deliberate. In the newer version, he was merely incompetent. In the new version, Dr. Guisenberger was dealt a hand much worse than my own. His country incinerated children. By comparison, slowly blinding them seems much less cruel.

I know enough about story to know that any story can be shaped. The shape of this story changed when I began to imagine a less painful way to view it. Imagining the doctor’s story differently made a difference. That and four operations. Now I am 20/350.

My brother still doesn’t trust eye doctors. He refuses to risk having surgery.

If our obstacles are our path, my path became that which was near to me, things I could hold in my hands and see clearly, like books or drawing and sewing. Nowadays it’s a computer.

I have Dr. Guisenberger to thank for shaping my path. He more than anyone else taught me the value of imagination. Imagination lets us forgive.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under My stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.