My Depressing Sight

My eyes still dilated after two hours of testing, I sat and watched the white-jacketed doctor pore over my chart. He intently flipped back and forth between 18 months’ worth of graphs and notations that tracked change in my vision. He peered down at photos of my optic nerve taken a year ago and compared them with those taken just 15 minutes earlier.

For 10 minutes, like a student cramming for an exam, he had his nose in my recent ocular past. At one point, without looking up, he said, “Sorry this is taking so long.”

All I could think to say was, “Uh huh.”

Finally he swung around in his chair and pronounced that he didn’t like the “trend” in my left eye. My field vision tests showed that my vision is still slowly deteriorating.

Let me be the first to say that I hadn’t noticed it. After all, I don’t go around one-eyed looking for little scattered lights blinking on the wall of a dimly lit dome in a doctor’s office.

I’m into sunsets at the beach, and evening of reading, a morning of writing and looking for signs of spring. My sight is still serving me quite well, thank you.

But the dome test showed I had this problem caused by early-stage glaucoma.

“I’d like to put you on beta blockers,” he said. “Do you have any problem with depression?” he asked, slowly introducing possible side effects from the medication.

“No” I said hesitatingly, feeling slightly depressed at the thought of drug-induced depression.

“How about heart problems. Palpitations, that sort of thing?”

“No problem,” I responded without skipping a beat.

“Occasionally, not often, but occasionally, patients experience these problems with the eye drops I’m recommending.”

For the past year I’d been using another type of drop to lower pressure in my eye. Less pressure could stop, or at least markedly slow, my loss of vision to glaucoma.

The right eye was fine, presumably thanks to the drops. But then the left….

The word “depression” hung in the air. I don’t think I’ve ever been depressed. Sure, some January mornings the warmth of bed has kept me from facing the day. The room beyond the covers has been depressingly cold.

No, when I come up short, my response is, sadly, anger at myself, but not depression.

Now the doctor was possibly, just possibly, presenting a Hobson’s choice. He never said it in so many words, but he was really probing whether I would prefer blindness to possible depression.

Does life at my stage come down to such choices?

As I say, the very thought of depression was depressing, and I hadn’t even started to squeeze the little bottle that would release a single drop of the drug into each eye once a day.

Is this the way it will be? You have a choice, “cancerous death or chemotherapy and radiation,” “deafness or hearing aids,” “blindness or depression.”

In each case, the choice is clear even though the obvious alternative is diminishes life.

Not quite take-it-or-leave-it Hobson's choices. Call them half Hobson’s. You accept them because, like full Hobson’s, you have no choice, not really.

• • • •

After reading this over, I should note that many people have no choice at all. There is no bad and less bad. It’s just plain bad.

I also know that some who read this will suggest that I have other choices besides the ones posed by the doctor. Indeed, the doctor may decide there is a better course if the new drug too doesn’t work or if the side effects, including depression, appear.

What I do find strange is the paradox that warnings of possible depression are themselves depressing. It's a bit like being intolerant of intolerance. Those are snares to avoid.

Vote to revise Portland's charter revision

Thomas Hobson, who ran a Cambridge, England, horse rental agency around the turn of the 17th Century, offered his clients the choice of riding only the horse presented to them or walking away on foot.

And so "Hobson's Choice" came to mean an offer of one option or nothing.

Any business offering a take-it-or-leave-it choice needs to track the results. Presumably if too many of Hobson's potential clients "left it," Hobson might reconsider his way of doing business.

Tom Hobson and his choice come to mind as we weigh another Tom-inspired choice: Mayor Tom Potter's Measure 26-91 charter revision on the May 15 ballot.

It offers a choice between keeping the our outdated "commission" form of government or instituting a "strong mayor"/city manager form as found in most American cities.

Under our current system, each of the five City Council members (including the mayor) administers separate governmental bureaus. Some call the commissioners' portfolios "fiefdoms;" others refer to them as "silos." I just call the whole concept "bad."

Note, by the way, that the five council members run for office, not by district, but city-wide.

Under the revision proposal, offered by the Mayor's charter revision commission, Portland's mayor would run the entire civic show acting through a city manager. The council, still five members elected city-wide, would decide policy questions and preside over the budget. The council also would have the final say over the hiring, and firing of the city manager and other bureau chiefs.

For reasons I'll get to in a moment, the proposal is utterly uninspired and unworthy of a city otherwise known for innovation and creativity.

In short, the ballot gives us a Hobson's choice between the present nag and the proposed one.

We should simply not vote at all on Measure 26-91.

But would City Hall actually get the message of our discontent with both forms of government?

As a matter of fact it would.

The first sign would be the obvious "undercount," or entire lack of votes, on the measure.

The more important and constructive signal would be a big "yes" vote for a nearby measure, Measure 26-89.

In essence, Measure 26-89 is the "back to the drawing board" option. It calls for a new charter review commission to convene at least once every 10 years. That seems like a long time until you realize that the measure also requires a charter commission to convene within the next two years to deal with the old, or new, deficiencies created by the lame Measure 26-91 outcome.

So what should a new charter revision commission do once it gathers around the drawing board?

First, the commission itself should include numerous representatives from the neighborhoods, where the civic heart beats strongest. The charter commission that put forward this May's revision had a sole neighborhood-affiliated member. It produced a predictable result: its proposed council, like the present one, utterly fails to recognize neighborhoods as civic institutions or to give them any voice or power.

Any new charter should have a council big enough (think 15 to 25 members, versus the current and proposed five) to guarantee representation by neighborhood, or at least by regional neighborhood coalition. The majority of the council (Two-thirds? Three-fourths?) ought to be elected by and in neighborhood-defined districts small enough that neighbors can get up-close and personal with their elected representatives.

But all of this is for the drawing board. First we must refuse to ride the Measure 26-91 Hobson's-Choice horse and stride away from the voting stable having voted resoundingly for Measure 26-89 and a fresh start start for reform.