My Life, Deleted by Scott Bolzan Page B

gone?”
    McPhee said my right pupil looked fine and the retina was intact, but he needed to do some testing before he could give me a prognosis. He had me lean my face into a machine with goggles and look at a series of black-dot patterns.
    I had no trouble seeing any of the dots with my left eye, but I could see only those that appeared in the upper two quadrants of my right eye, with total darkness below the line that went from four to eight o’clock.
    The technician printed up the results for McPhee, which were no surprise to me because they were just as I’d described my vision impairment. The doctor agreed with Goodell’s opinion that my problem was likely caused by a microscopic hemorrhage in the optic nerve, and he could suggest only one treatment: an aggressive ten-day trial of prednisone. If the steroids worked to repair the damage, he said, I should start seeing improvement within those ten days.
    We made a follow-up appointment for a couple of weeks later, but on our way out I told Joan I wasn’t very encouraged. “That didn’t help much,” I said.
    â€œWell, let’s give this a shot and see what happens,” she replied.
    My skepticism unfortunately was proven out. By the time we were ready to go back, I still couldn’t see out of the bottom of my right eye, and although McPhee had already told us the steroids were the only treatment he could recommend, we still hoped he might refer us to a surgeon who could offer us an innovative treatment.
    Before going to McPhee’s office, we stopped across the street at Scottsdale Healthcare to pick up the records from my hospital stay. This went faster than expected, so with the breeze wafting through the windows of Joan’s parked Porsche Boxster, I took the opportunity to relax a bit and get some sun while she sat next to me, reading the medical reports.
    I was sitting with my eyes closed, on the verge of dozing off, when Joan startled me. “Son of a bitch, you had opiates in your system,” she said.
    Rattled, I sat up and shouted, “What the hell does that mean?”
    â€œWait a minute, let me finish,” Joan said, sounding pissed off.
    What did I do? What did I screw up now?
    I tried to wait patiently until she’d finished reading the page, after which she let out a big sigh. “Okay, that makes sense now,” she said.
    â€œGood,” I said. “Now, you want to tell me what the hell that was all about?”
    Joan said she’d read the report from the second ER doctor first, which showed that I’d had opiates in my system, but that was because the first ER doctor had already given me morphine for the pain.
    â€œOkay,” I said, “but what the hell is an opiate?”
    Joan explained that an opiate was a narcotic such as morphine, Percocet, or oxycodone, like what I was taking for my headaches.
    â€œSo why did you get so upset at first?” I asked, confused.
    â€œBecause if you took something for pain that morning, prior to the fall, it would show up in your system, and they would think you fell because of the medication you took,” she said.
    Not understanding the subtle differences in meaning for the words drug and medication, as in recreational drugs versus prescription drugs, I mistakenly thought she was saying I had a drug problem. I also jumped to the erroneous conclusion that she thought I’d had drugs in my system before I got to the hospital and that’s why I fell. If this was true, it would certainly explain why she kept moving my pain medication around the house.
    I tried to digest the contradictions in what I thought she was saying and piece the puzzle together. But I couldn’t make sense of it; I was going to have to ask her straight out. I looked at her and asked, very seriously, “Am I a drug addict, and if not, is someone in our family?”
    Joan’s face went blank. I could tell I hit a nerve, and I braced myself for the