Ella nodded, unable to say why she’d come. His kind look made her tear up again, and she had tried so hard to clean up her face in the elevator before coming to his office.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “How are you?”
“Ella, Ella,” he said, seeing the tears in her eyes. He put his arm around her shoulder, and he stood between her and Ted.
“Oh, Daddy. I’m okay.”
“I know. I know you’re okay.”
Ella tried to gather herself up again. “Ted’s eye. He can’t see.”
Douglas faced the young man.
“Ah-buh-jee,” Ted said reflexively. He’d called Ella’s dad that since they’d gotten married. “I mean, Doctor—”
Douglas clenched his jaw. Hearing the boy calling him “Father” and then correcting himself was hard. Until the day Douglas’s father-in-law passed away, Douglas had called the father of his long-deceased wife Ah-buh-jee.
“What’s the matter with your eye? Here, have a seat.”
Ted sat. “I’m sorry to bother you like this. We were at the lawyers’， and talking about something, then suddenly I couldn’t see. Out of my right eye. I mean, I can see, but what I see isn’t right.” He spoke rapidly.
Douglas led Ted by the arm and guided him to the examination room next door. Ella came along.
The examination room was darkened, and a thin bolt of light projected a series of eye charts on the white wall. Douglas asked him to read the first letter on every line on the eye chart, but Ted could hardly make out the largest E on the top row. Douglas put dilating drops in Ted’s eyes that stung painfully.
“Wow,” Ted said, blinking back tears.
“It’ll pass,” Douglas said. He’d forgotten the anesthetizing drops prior to dilating him.
Using the ophthalmoscope, Douglas checked behind Ted’s eyes, then moved on to the 90-diopter lens for better resolution.
“Central serous retinopathy,” he pronounced.
“What’s that?” Ella asked her father. She was familiar with many medical terms just from being his daughter, but she hadn’t heard that diagnosis before.
“There’s a tear in your retinal tissues, and fluid has seeped in, causing a distortion in your vision.”
Ted’s head jerked back. “How?” he asked.
“There aren’t any obvious reasons for this. No one knows for certain. I can guess from what’s going on in your life and so can you that there are a lot of dramatic events in it. More men tend to get this than women. It’s been correlated with stress. And perhaps from elevated cortisol levels, also related to stress. You know, when you feel out of control. Especially since central serous retinopathy tends to affect type-A personalities.” Douglas made a face as though he didn’t like saying this, because it sounded too judgmental. “It can recur, and it can also just clear up by itself. I don’t see many cases of this. But I have seen a few. All of them were men, and all of them were experiencing great stress in their lives. Also having an objectively high-stress job—like pilots, for example. They apparently get this. Stress.” Douglas shrugged, because who didn’t feel stress these days?
“But we don’t have any stress,” Ella said, and laughed. Ted laughed, too.
“I’m glad you find this so amusing,” Douglas said.
Ted closed his right eye and focused with his left. His face leaned forward toward Douglas’s face. Ella’s dad, seated on the other side of the slit lamp, looked nothing like his own father. A soft pile of gray hair crowned his head, and a perennial tan from tennis and golf made him look rested. The crow’s-feet around his eyes grew only mildly deeper when he smiled. He wore a jacket and tie with chinos. Almost never a white coat at his offices. The biggest difference was their hands. Ella’s dad had medium-size hands with long, tapered fingers. His nails were cut short in a square shape and had small white moons near the cuticles. Ted’s hands were more like Ella’s father’s than his own father’s. He had known all along that losing Ella’s dad’s respect was something quite serious, but it had been easier not to think about it when he hadn’t seen him. Ted missed his own father sharply.
“So what do you think I should do?” he asked.
“It’ll take a few weeks or a few months to completely clear up. It can fix itself. I’ve seen that. Or it can get worse. Some people have this in a chronic form. And that is a dangerous thing. We can try to fix it if it gets to that. But it might not necessarily help to operate. Let’s see how you do without any intervention. This is serious, though, Ted. You don’t want to lose your vision.”