It’s an early, brisk morning. The kind where the sun blinds you if you even slightly face its direction. I tiptoe down the stairs, careful not to wake anyone, and prepare to feed my bunny, Bandit. He’s always waiting with his little ears perked, as if he’s been starving for days. Once he’s crunching away at breakfast, I turn to my own quiet ritual: checking my blood sugar.
The number flashes higher than I want. It hasn’t been good for a while. After years of keeping my diabetes under control with diet alone, I’m back on medication. It wasn’t a shock exactly. I’ve been watching the scale creep up for years and feeling that frustrating, slow loss of control. But injuring both knees set me back further than I ever expected.
A few weeks ago, I saw an orthopedic surgeon, one of several specialists I’ve been visiting lately — though I’ll get to that in a moment. He told me there wasn’t anything catastrophic, just some deterioration of the cartilage behind my left kneecap. Nothing “serious,” in his words, though it doesn’t feel that way when stairs make me wince. He sent me home with painkillers and a list of physical therapists, which still sits on the kitchen counter, folded next to the mail.
I tried to shake off the morning heaviness by turning on a Matt Groening feature from CBS Sunday Morning that I’d missed the week before. But I couldn’t focus. My mind kept drifting to the calendar, to that looming doctor’s appointment coming up in early November.
It’s strange how it all started so simply — I just needed new glasses. But right before the optometrist visit, I decided to start testing my blood sugar again. The readings terrified me: 180s, sometimes over 200. I made a quick appointment with my primary care doctor before she left the practice for a new life in the Caribbean — lucky her. They ran an A1C test right there in the office: 7.5. Not catastrophic, but not good either. Two years ago, I was at 4.8. It had been so good for so long that I was taken off all my diabetes medications. Maybe that was a mistake.
I left the office with a new prescription and a referral to the orthopedic surgeon. After a decade of keeping everything in check, I had slid backward. My knees, my diet, my energy — all slipping away.
And then came the optometrist. During the exam, she was calm and polite but paused longer than usual on one image. There’s a kind of silence doctors do when they don’t want to alarm you. Finally, she said she wanted me to see an ophthalmologist. She didn’t like the look of the “freckle” behind my right eye.
I already knew it existed; they’d found it years ago, back when I thought freckles in the eye were just an interesting trivia fact about my body. But she didn’t have the old photo to compare. The receptionist booked me an appointment before I even left the office.
That follow-up appointment was this past Monday.
Three hours of waiting. Endless tests. Bright lights. Eye drops that made the world blur into watercolor. I sat in the dark room afterward as the ophthalmologist reviewed the images. When he came back in, his tone was cautious but honest. He said he didn’t like what he saw. The freckle was large, pigmented, and had fluid — all classic warning signs of an ocular melanoma.
The word melanoma hit me hard. I remember quite vividly my head jerking back at that moment.
He emphasized that nothing was confirmed yet — I’d need to see an ocular oncologist for that. But my brain barely registered the details. I was already spiraling, imagining treatments, blindness, the tiny fraction of specialists in the world who deal with this kind of cancer. I later discovered that there are only about 7,000 new diagnoses every year worldwide. Statistically invisible, but suddenly, now, my whole world.
I’ve always thought of myself as a visual person. I notice color, patterns, the play of light on surfaces. My entire life has been framed by sight. The idea of losing even part of that feels unbearable.
I’m trying to stay grounded — to tell myself it could still be benign, that there’s hope. But I also know how easily things can turn. So I’m preparing myself, as best I can, for the possibility of losing some of my vision.
The few people I’ve shared this news with have had mixed reactions. All have been supportive, but few can handle the treatment details that I want to talk about — that I need to talk about.
For now, all I can do is wait for the next appointment and hope for better news. The uncertainty is exhausting, but it reminds me what I value, what I want to hold on to — and how much I still want to see.