This morning as the kids lined up for school, Zian’s mom told me that her husband’s retina accidentally detached for no good reason. It started peeling off the back of his eyeball like shredding wallpaper. So: emergency surgery. They inject an air bubble into your eyeball and you have to lie face down in bed for a week so that the bubble pushes up on your retina and it will stick itself back in place.
– I can’t believe this works
– I can’t believe anyone thought of it
– How did they test it?
– OMG it would be hard to lie face down for that long
– Once again: they injected stuff into his eyeball!
– Ew!
We all listened with morbid fascination. At least if it ever happens to me… if my vision in one eye starts suddenly going black, like an eclipse… then I’ll be comforted, sort of, to know what’s about to happen and that there is some treatment for it.
Then as she said it was like having an extra child she had to take care of… We began talking birth control. One of them said she was planning on making her husband get a vasectomy. Well, no. Actually she said something way more obscene and went “snip!” in the air with scissors and laughed diabolically. Before they were married he wanted 6 children and she wanted none and so she told him that his next 5 wives would have to do it because his first one (her) would not. She had to go off the pill because her doctor said she’d been on it too long. Another mom said it was probably not too long till she “wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore” and then we all pointed out scary examples of 50 year olds we have known who were NOT done with fertility. I said I was tying my tubes this summer because in theory I have 20 years of fertility left and I don’t want to deal with that. Well, it was fun to get into that conversation with other moms who are pretty much strangers. It happens a lot on the playground and at strange random moments.