We are often taught that the best way to face stressful situations is to face them head on, with both eyes wide open.   That certainly works when the stresses are small, but sometimes life can seem so unwieldy and out of control that “head on” just doesn’t work.   Our bodies adapt to trauma by initially shutting down, becoming numb, and then titrating the return of feelings when we have built up enough strength to handle them.

When I originally wrote the above paragraph, and many of the paragraphs to follow, I was thinking about the case of the human eye.   But now, after my cancer diagnosis, the human eye becomes a trivial metaphor for the assaults that we humans can and do encounter.

Once the eye adapts to darkness, a flash of bright light is experienced as a trauma.   Pupils that had been wide open to accept as much light as possible in the dark instantly constrict to protect the retina from damage, and just like an emotionally traumatic experience, it takes a much longer time for pupils to adapt to the darkness and widen after exposure to such harsh light than it took to shut down.

For pilots flying at night, this loss of dark adaptation can be particularly harmful, because it can take up to half an hour for pupils to return to its adapted state.   So pilots learn certain “tricks” to prevent this from happening.   One of these is simply to never shine bright light in the cockpit at night, so pilots use a flashlight with a red lens over it to reduce brightness to a minimum.   And they typically turn all panel lights and anything required to read instruments to their lowest possible setting.

But there is another simple trick that some pilots use when flying at night. When faced with the need to turn on a bright light, pilots will simply close one eye instantly so that they lose their dark adaptation only in that one eye.   Once the source of the bright light disappears, they open the closed eye that has not experienced the bright light.   The pupil in that eye remains dilated, making the re-adaptation back to darkness much quicker and easier.

When I first heard the news of my cancer, it was all too much for me to take.  I have had a blessed life, one that I have clearly become too attached to.   I typically wake up excited about the day ahead of me, because I love my work, my family, and my environment.  But the diagnosis, and the accompanying look in the eyes of the physicians who seemed to stare in disbelief at the tumor in my tongue and throat, was too blinding of a light.  Then, scheduling one test after another, most days brought only worsening news.

I immediately thought of Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief, and it was easy to identify the first stage of shock.   It was all too much for me to handle.  The shock moves into denial, as one or both eyes close.  In the ensuing days, even weeks now, I still retain the ridiculous idea that all these physicians are somehow wrong, that all their tests are being misread, and—as the kind doctor in Armenia told me when I first discovered the lump in my tongue, “it’s only a cyst.”

The shock and denial must eventually give way if one is going to move forward. I do feel angry but I am grateful that anger is the least of what I am feeling.   I am struggling to open up one eye at a time and find a way to face this, to feel the intense love I am so fortunate to have around me.    Whatever the outcome, I am trying to find some dignity, to let go of attachments, to find some grace.