Fall in May

~25~ The Lunch of the Five Sense's

"Sure why not." She sighs all kinds of resigned and seems to deflate in front of my eyes.

"So I was wondering if you..."

"You know on second thought, I just changed my mind." She cuts me off clean, before I can even start up the stupid. "Let me save you the trouble of trying to figure out the nice way to ask what you really want to know. The answer is from birth ...and no, it's not because of The Syphilis."

"Oh...kaaay." So you've been hiding out in bathrooms from birth, but not from The Syphilis? Yes, that would "supposably" explain a lot of things, including the whole sunglasses at night thing?

"There's even a fancy medico name for my condition, that you'll never be able to pronounce or remember. So when this comes up, usually right away to right about now? I have what I call my Fives, Sixes and Sevens speech. So kindly save your questions and comments until the end."

From her pursed lips, and I can tell that she is starting to get very unhappy now for some reason. So I decide the best course of action is to just let her have her say and see where this goes.

"So the When?" She sighs. "Anywhere from a couple of hours after my birth to a couple of days later. You see technically I wasn't born blind per se ...I was made blind." I've begun to notice that her highly agitated hands flaying around, have a certain practiced pattern to them. One that tells me this is by far not the first time she has given this speech.

"See I was born premature, like right on death's door premature. With extremely low birth weight, underdeveloped lungs and a heart defect which required some surgery. Just to name off a few of the fun factors of my tragic birth. So when a baby is born as severely premature as I was, your life options are pretty limited at that point to blind or dead." 

"So the best way I have to explain the limited options is to repeat what I was told by my doctor when I was five, and I asked when I could start watching cartoons with April. That I should think of myself as a baby bun. And when I first came out of the mommy oven, I was severely undercooked. A very undone bun, so to say." May is speaking in rapid staccato now, snapping out words like a machine gun. 

"So what do they do with undone buns like me? We get shoved back in another oven to cook longer, called an incubator. So the way to cook the undone buns to done in the incubator oven is with oxygen therapy. In order to counter the whole death by suffocation thing thanks to those undeveloped lungs." She takes a deep breath to pause for effect.

"So into the incubator oven, I went." May wipes her hands clean. "So just as in all baking, you have to cook it just right the first time, or you basically burn the bun to a crisp. Things like ...say checking the temperature? Or timing the burn just long enough to cook right? Oh, and keeping your eyes on the oven to make sure everything cooks just so."

"But in my case, they cooked me in the oven wrong. So I came out one overdone bun ...burnt blind so to say? And like all burns, there was scaring." May taps the side of her head. "But in the inside, where the eyes connect to my burnt blind brain."

"Onto the Why? Life is as good an answer as any, I suppose?" She shrugs. "I try to think of it as a trade-off, eyes for lungs, my sight for my life. You know, in order to keep doing that breathing thing I enjoy doing so much?"

"So why can't they just fix me? Have one of those operations that transplant dead people's eyes in me?" She snorts at the idea of this obvious solution. "Well, because by the time someone figured out that the bun in the oven got burnt blind? None of those options would address those burnt-to-a-crisp parts inside my head."

"So now on to the sixth sense and superpowers stupidity." While I can't see her eyes behind her nightshades, I can hear the eye-rolling irritation in her voice. "Contrary to comic book lore and ancient science fiction literary tropes? No, I do not possess some heightened sixth sense that overcompensates for my lost sight, like Esp or bat sonar. Blind people developing radar or supersonic hearing makes about as much sense as deaf people developing x-ray vision."