Jazzanine

[ I had just been informed by doctors at the Jules Stein Eye Clinic that I needed emergency surgery immediately. ] As Chic put it so eloquently in 1978: Freak Out ! It was now 7 at night. I had left my work half done at the office. I hadn't eaten. There was no one to come pick me up or get my car out of the hospital parking lot. My company had just switched medical insurance carriers and I didn't even have an ID card yet. I didn't know if it would cover something like this. I had been expecting the clinic to simply dole out a future appointment with a laser and a prescription for eye drops. But there was a possibility I could be BLIND, at least in one eye, where if a retinal detachment involves the central macula, eyesight in that eye is irretrievable. I was shocked by what they were proposing. The operation involved knocking me out, extracting my eyeball, clamping it into a plastic belt called a scleral buckle that would keep my raggedy eye tissue together, then reinsertin...

If I told you all that happened to me since January, you wouldn't believe it. OK, maybe you would -- it was ME having trouble believing, since I still have problems adapting to any sort of glitches in the life program. I had spent most of January in New York, riding the subway and working out of the main office. It was .... not horrible, but definitely less comfortable than my LA routine. So I returned to the West Coast. My life is just easier to manage on the West Coast, despite it being far from my kith and kin, offering a shallow wading pool for dating, and growing ever more expensive. So there I was in February, still living with friends in Cali after four months with most of my belongings in storage, trying to adjust to the stunning revelation that no, I was not going to be moving in glory and triumph to the East Coast after announcing this intention to all and sundry. I was looking desperately for a new LA apartment to get out of my friends' hair and re-establish my life ...