On My Blindness (Part 4)

I reached the top of the ladder welded into the roaster and Roger Grosvenor and other Zinc Plant workers pulled me out. I don't know if the ambulance was there at that moment or if it came later. What I do know is that my body was convulsing. I know I was so overcome by sulfur dioxide that I couldn't speak. I know that my sight was diminishing. It was as if the world around me was wrapped in cheesecloth. I know that someone put a mask of oxygen over my face. I know that I hated how the oxygen felt. I pushed it away. My respiratory system was so dominated by sulfur dioxide that oxygen felt alien. It hurt. Someone forced in on me again. I could only resist it so long.

Dad rode with me to the hospital. I remember nothing about that ride except that I could feel the eeriness of death. The quiet was heavy. I was hacking. I was going blind. It was as if I were tottering on the edge of a girder on a skyscraper being built. I thought I might fall any moment.

We arrived at the hospital. Dr. Whitesell was the M.D. attending to me. He was a drunk. His hands were shaky. I joked with my mom and dad about "old shaky". I joked about feeling worse in the morning with my hangover than I did right then, gassed. A nurse gave me a shot. No more jokes. The shot put me out. I went into a deep sleep.

I woke up later in the afternoon. I couldn't open my eyes. They weren't bandaged. They were, by the power of my body, sealed shut. I found out I'd be going to Cd'A in the morning for eye surgery. I don't remember if the Kellogg doctors knew that my cornea had been burnt by the way the tears became sulfuric acid or if I found that out the next day.

Dale Costa, son of Dick Costa, proprietor of Dick and Floyd's, drove me to Cd'A. An eye specialist removed the damaged tissue, bandaged my eyes and my blindness continued.

I was assured by the doctor that eyes heal quickly. He assured me that I could expect a full recovery. However, he said, I would have patches over my eyes for the next five days. I would be blind.

During those five days, because the external world was not available to me, all I could do was turn my vision inward. My blindness initiated an intense self-examination, a self-examination beyond my capacity to understand. For many years, I sorted out what happened during those five days. Here's some of what happened:

First of all, when blindness forced my eyes inward, I saw a void. Emptiness. It was if I were seeing a huge open sky over the expanse of the sea. It was as if I were standing at the far east end of a desert and looking west. It was as if a cloudy night had fallen over the Palouse and I was in the middle of a wheat field and it was inky dark with no star or moon.

Looking back, it was unsettling to me that I had created so little tangible meaning in my life. The positive side of this emptiness was that I could see, in retrospect, that I had plenty of emptiness to fill.

The unsettling part was that I had constructed so little.

Therefore, the overwhelming sensation of being blind for those five days didn't have much to do with the external physical world I couldn't see.

It had much more to do with the invisible inner world I had, until then, largely ignored.