Peripheral Vision
It is “only “a local YMCA basketball game. The players are probably 13 or 14, on the cusp of aging out of organized Y sports. My son Ross is the point guard, as he usually is now that the kids are old enough to have clear positions. Ross has come, reluctantly, to an understanding of his physical limitations. I am partly to blame for the fact that he will likely not top 5’ 9.’’ I think he has forgiven me for this. He still blames me, with some affection, for the fact that he is not blazingly fast: “Mom,” he says gently, “It looks like you are running but you’re not.” He is quick, which I have come to realize is different than being fast. He knows he will not be an NBA player or even a college athlete, but he played in several leagues and took pride in his performance.
Today, on this familiar court, he plays transcendently. In my memory he scores over 30 points and has 10 assists. That’s just my memory though. Thirty points is as much as some teams score in a whole game at the Y. Despite my penchant for sports statistics—again, something Ross inherits from me—the numbers, on this day at least, are not important. I watch my son take the ball up the court and realize that there is something magical about him. He sees everything—every player waiting for a pass, every movement of the ball. Today it is as if he can actually see behind him. This is called court vision, a matter perhaps of 270 degrees. More colloquially, what my son has, in addition to passing skills, intelligence, and drive, is the physical gift of peripheral vision.
Four years later, my son is visiting an oncological ophthalmologist, a specialty we did not know existed until we made an emergency appointment with one after years of light sensitivity, episodes of double vision, and the discovery of a tumor in his pituitary gland. I am in the waiting room, taking notes, while he is being examined. In the notebook I have bought to keep track of his health, I write “ontological ophthalmologist,” perhaps because this is the way I am feeling: the world as I know it has been turned on its side. This is the first time since Ross complained of blurry vision and exhaustion, since he was misdiagnosed with depression and then a benign tumor known as a pituitary adenoma (he diagnosed himself from the internet and his doctors agreed), that I am angry at my son. I am so angry, in fact, that I literally can hardly see the page in front of me. I cannot continue to record Ross’s visits and test results or even to self-soothe with the Trollope novel that saw me through my labor.
Ross has insisted that I stay in the waiting room while he sees the doctor alone. He is 20. Since he was 18, I have needed his permission to attend his appointments; probably since he was 14 or so, I have been happy not to participate to wait outside with my credit card and to fill out insurance forms. It felt pleasingly as if he were growing up, those minor appointments for a hurt finger or annual check-ups signs of his growing independence. Now I worry he will not grow up.
Every bone in my body tells me I should be there, inside the room with the doctor and his machines, to take notes to advocate. I would do as much, I remind Ross on the drive over to his appointment, for my husband or a friend. I have done this as a volunteer for strangers— survivors of rape or domestic violence, for friends with cancer, for friends afraid they have cancer. He insists on going in alone. I realize that I have never really been able to persuade Ross of anything. I also realize that all the practical reasons for being there—the notes, the advocacy whatever that means, the support—are an alibi for the real reason I want to be there. I love him and my love will – could perhaps be — magical. My love just might change bad news into good. As someone who always insist on using the word “parent” rather than “mother” when it comes to loving and caring for your child, I collapse into the emotional vortex of gender. I need to be there because I am his mother.
I also do not expect Ross to tell me everything. He will try, he will think he is reporting on the visit, but he will leave out detail. My sons attribute my need for what I think of as information to my being a Victorianist. They make fun of me for demanding what they have learned to call “realist detail” or simply “dialogue.” He comes out and tells me that his peripheral vision is gone. The tumor has pressed up against his optic nerve. His vision could improve slightly, but not very much. The loss is probably permanent.
After chemotherapy, after radiation, the tumor disappears. The scans are a triumph; “visually,” his radiologist tells us, “there is nothing there.” She means, of course, that there is no evidence of a tumor. Ross slowly begins to recover. It takes longer than the cancer specialists told us it would. With his doctors’ encouragement, we plan a healing vacation in Scotland, with modest hikes. He fills out the paperwork to return to school. Neither one of these goes exactly to plan, but over time, a long time, he stops being tired and sick. His lightning-fast brain eventually comes back, his hair comes back, but not, as predicted, his peripheral vision.
About a year into his first year back at college, Ross does an experiment for his sports management class, measuring variation in peripheral vision. His subjects come from two groups with whom he has connections: college athletes and English department graduate students. His apparatus is a bit crude, but the experiment shows startling differences in degrees of visual field. Ross concludes that professional sports teams would benefit from adding peripheral vision to height, weight, wingspan, jumping height, hand size and the many other bodily metrics that go into recruitment and drafting. I don’t ask him explicitly, but it seems that when he tested his own measuring system he was far more like and English graduate student than like an athlete, far more like me than like the basketball player he was.
The time of healing from cancer is not linear, although it is a joy to see the numbers of years post illness add up on the left side of an imaginary ledger. This year, in late September, Facebook reminded Ross that it had been ten years since his diagnosis, and he reminded me. Since 2012 and Ross’s initial diagnosis, I have felt that familiar anniversary feeling in the early fall, that inexplicable tightening of the throat and sense of unease; those bodily reminders of bad times; those reminders that the body knows better than other kinds of calendars. A tenth anniversary of a bad time does not quite, even in the reassuring roundness of its numbers, feel quite like a good time. On the anniversary we made chicken biryani and had a rare family meal at the dining room table that since COVID has been mostly used as a work station.
Ten years is a long time—the lifetime of our most magical dog who came into our home to comfort us during Ross’s treatment. Ten years since diagnosis means that we are all ten years older, that my husband and I are aging, that my son Paul has grown up, and that our dog Sydney is 70 in dog years. Ten years since diagnosis is a long time; the tenth anniversary shortens that time, bringing September 24th of this year into uneasy intimacy with that September day 10 years ago. Thinking time to be outside, to the side of, cancer requires something like peripheral vision—the ability to focus not only on the future but to the left and right, and if you can bear it, to what is, it seems, behind you.