Talk Vomit

By Whitney Lewis

I first noticed the symptoms—spots in the corners of my vision and a general sense of visual disintegration—shortly after the indictment of the President and shortly before the movie theater bombing. It was around the time all those families were massacred at the swimming pool. Those events didn’t affect me, in particular, I’m just trying to provide a timeline. Precision is key when you’re trying to solve a medical mystery. 

I maintained my calm initially. Tried the usual drops and flushes and cooling packs. I consulted the What-Cancer-Do-You-Have website and completed the exhaustive questionnaire. Had I had a concussion or infection? Had I been exposed to allergens? Hazardous chemicals or active radiation? 

I imagined myself striding down a city block, wading through carcinogenic smoke and burning exhaust and the belched clouds of e-cigarettes, carbon gasses and body gasses and detritus from factories and power plants and wildfires all raining down, the piercing pitch of a bubbling, toxic kettle rising, rising, rising until my eyes burned and streamed with tears and I fell to my knees, clawing at my face and shrieking in pain.

I checked yes to all the questions and learned I had squamous cell carcinoma and ocular melanoma and retinoblastoma. Just as I suspected. 

I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously without an official diagnosis, so I visited general practitioners, optometrists, ophthalmologists, retina specialists, homeopaths, an ayurvedic healer and even acupuncturist who arranged a dozen slender needles in half-moons from my brow bone to the shallow terrain above my cheeks.

Relief and disappointment in equal measure when they found no evidence of triple cancer or anything else wrong with my eyes. Months of investigation and I came away with little more than an ever-growing list of nugget-sized pieces of medical wisdom: keep a journal, log my symptoms, sleep 8 hours, limit sugar intake, get plenty of fiber, diversify my microbiome, walk 10,000 steps a day, do resistance training, wear protective eyewear, stay hydrated, lower my carbon footprint, engage in mindfulness, feng shui my living space, shop local, and most importantly, ignore what’s happening and just get along with my day because it’s probably all in my head. 

“Aren’t my eyeballs in my head?” I started asking, but no one likes a smart-ass.

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I told my friend Rebecca about my condition, and she asked me if I’d heard about hysterical blindness. I said, “Do I seem hysterical to you?” We were sitting side-by-side in massage chairs at the time, big tubs of water at our feet as industrious Vietnamese ladies removed the dead skin from our heels. Rebecca didn’t take the hint. 

“There’s this interesting case study from Cambodia. It was after what’s-his-name took over and tried to turn the whole place into an agrarian commune,” she said, giving the nail tech a thumbs up that she approved of the color they’d selected.

“That sounds nice,” I replied.

“What? Oh the commune. Ya, good idea, bad execution. Hah—execution—” she spread her mouth into a frown to show she wasn’t making light of execution. “Anyway, the dictator guy wanted everyone to be farmers and made all the city-people move out to the fields and like, dig trenches and plant crops all day.”

I imagined myself, tanned and lean, tending to a garden wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat and breezy linen pants. “Doesn’t sound so bad,” I admitted.

“Huh? Oh sorry I left out the part where he killed everyone. He genocided like a quarter of the country. Then all these refugees—umm that one, no, yeah that one, the lavender—” Rebecca interrupted herself while choosing her scented foot scrub. “Where was I?”

“Genocide?

“Oh ya, so obviously lots of people fled the genocide and came to the U.S. or wherever but they had seen like, the worst things imaginable,” she emphasized this last part, perhaps afraid I was still imagining a community garden.

“And then like, hundreds of these Cambodian women reported losing their vision. All of a sudden they were basically blind, but no one could explain why. I think the doctors eventually concluded that their eyes or brains just couldn’t handle all the murder and destruction, so their bodies just stopped being able to see altogether.”

I considered all the worst things I had seen. My childhood dog put to sleep by the vet last year. That was pretty terrible. I saw my grandma when she was dying from cancer and remember the sickening hollowness of her eye sockets. One time, my friend Jordan was driving in front of me and I watched his car get smashed to pieces when someone ran a red light. Could those memories be making me blind? It seemed a distinct possibility, but I also felt a feminist obligation to reject—publicly, at least—any association with the hysterical.

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My sight steadily worsened and as it did, I felt compelled to share my story. I posted updates on GorgeBerry and received hundreds of messages. There were words of support (praying!), treatment ideas (have u tried magnets?), and occasional naysayers and conspiracy theorists saying I was doing it all for attention. As if anyone pays attention to blind people.

I took a leave of absence from work to focus on my research. Rebecca and a few other friends would come to my apartment to bring over take-out and check in. My guests were always kind enough to catch me up on the happenings of the outside world—celebrity divorces and yacht-sinking orcas; billionaires colonizing mars and toddlers with eating disorders; increases in autism, ballooning national debt, a shortage of pure-bred Corgis; the mass shooting of the day.

Nearing complete blindness, I became a fervent podcast listener and a new, dazzling world of terror opened up before me. I learned about the loneliness epidemic and diseases emerging from the polar ice caps; advancements in oncology and climatology and cosmography and pornography; true crime cold cases of dismembered women and senators in sex cults and the conspiracy behind the Chinese synchronized swim team.

Listening, listening, hour after hour, I began to hear the silences more clearly than the shouting. I began to uncover an invisible internal structure to the events unfolding. I began to see there are no discrete happenings or random occurrences, no linear relationship between cause and effect. There are no independent organizing principles or true differentiation between virtuous and wicked, progress and decline. There are no nations or laws or borders or businesses or taxes or homes or individual choice. There is only the creeping center of an endless spiral, an infinitely compacted single point the size of pinprick into which is distilled every lit candle and stifled scream seared into our memories. Now, whether my eyes are open or closed I see it, that single prick of light. And I open my mouth to swallow it whole, bloated and content knowing the worst has happened and the worst is yet to come, and I’ll be here for every moment.

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