Now go home and tell your Granny she's dead.
About two years ago my partner was making the bed and he went blind in one eye. In his typically Stoic, New-England way, he went about his business for the day, as normal, after calling his Primary Care Physician and his Ophthalmologist, of course. He did barn chores--slopped the pigs, milked the cow, hayed the horse, collected the eggs--and helped cook meals. I even caught him in his workshop using a hammer. The bastard hammers better with one eye than I do with two.
The verdict from the Ophth (I'm not spelling it out again): probable broken blood vessel. The vitreous humour was clouded through with blood, and it would probably clear naturally in two, three, four weeks. Maybe five. Maybe. Probably. Was it related to his diabetes? Maybe. Hard to tell. Once the eye had cleared, they would gaze inside to see what was the matter.
This was one of many of our own, personal "long emergencies" involving his diabetes, which had struck him as a teenager for no reason, no reason whatsoever. We had endured skin infections and strange, stomach ailments, and hypoglycemic attacks at 3 a. m. when I had to keep his airway patent and get him to swallow some Coca-Cola one gulp at a time. He has been extremely lucky: At 57, he is thin as a post, has no circulatory problems, no extremities missing, and, as his PCP likes to say, his "liver and onions" are fine.
The eye cleared up, gradually. Meanwhile, he continued to use his hammer in spite of my screaming. He lived hand-to-mouth in an unheated Maine farmhouse during the recession of the 1970s.
When it was all clear, his appointment with the Ophth went well: They found nothing, nothing at all. No broken blood vessel. Nothing to cauterize. Optic nerve, fine. Retina, fine. WTF? He went blind!
This eye thing was the effing worst! By God, I was going to do something about it! If he was going blind, I was going to figure out why!
So we planned a group pow-wow with his PCP. I had my list of questions. We were going to get to the bottom of this. I wasn't prepared for the simplicity of the PCP's largely-monosyllabic answers. Would this happen again? Don't know. Was it caused by a broken blood vessel? Probably. Not sure. Was it related to the diabetes? Don't know. Would it happen again? Ditto. Don't know. What an awkward consultation.
The moral of this long, seemingly irrelevant anecdote: Two medical doctors--a general practitioner and an Ophth guy--with literally decades of training and experience between them, were not able to answer our questions about this one little eye, but by God, the Archdruid knows that my partner is going to die from lack of insulin because of oil disruptions.
***
"They're all gonna laugh at you!" Carrie 's mom.
The on-line responses to my diatribes against the Uber-doomer hacks were enlightening and entertaining. Mind you, my shift of point of view was minuscule : I still called myself a "doomer" but I was going to be an agnostic doomer. I was not going to treat every utterance by the hacks as if it were Holy Writ. I was going to ask critical questions. Unfortunately, the other commenters let me know that I was "on a crusade," that I have "my shorts in a wad," that I have "my own inner narrative," that I "need a drink," and that I was bringing the discussion "down the toilet," the usual boring Internet tropes, for which I must thank them very much because they taught me that they have no counterarguments.
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