Dark days

Suffering demands desperate faith and desperate friends | Matthew P. Ristuccia

Sometime during the midnight hours of Wednesday, April 25, a portion of the optic nerve in my left eye died. I didn't know it at the time; I was sound asleep. When the alarm sounded at 6:15, I noticed a yellow-green spot in the center of my vision, like the after-image from looking at a bright light. It was glowing, gossamer and fixed, a thin and annoying mass of colored cotton candy.

That was the first day, the day of yellow-green.

Afterward came the days of mud-brown. The yellow-green spot panned to the right, painting itself a mud-brown stained with the red of rusted iron. The doctor nodded when I spoke about red—"the color of blood" is what I think he said. He said a lot more—but not before asking seemingly irrelevant questions. Irrelevant until, putting them together, I startled and responded, "You don't think I have a tumor, do you?"