Chapter 35
Grizzly
I’d specifically scheduled the appointment for early morning in an attempt to not dwell on the outcome all day. Daddy arrived at my door far earlier than needed.
I opened the door, and he was standing on my porch in a plain gray t-shirt and dark jeans. His ballcap was on backwards, making me wish he was here to take me to bed rather than to the doctor.
"Ready to go, baby?"
"Not yet. You're a bit early."
"I know. Wanted to be sure you didn’t have too much time alone to worry about this. After I move in, you won’t have to answer the door for me."
After letting him inside, I took off for the bedroom. I’d been back there getting ready before his arrival. Of course, Daddy followed and asked questions along the way.
"How are you feeling about the appointment? Any nerves?"
"Nope," I lied.
He leaned against the doorjamb, giving me a look that said he could smell my bullshit from a mile away. I would’ve argued if the expression wasn’t so accurate.
"Nervous," I amended.
He nodded like that was the correct answer, and he was glad I'd found it. "Me too, a little."
That surprised me enough I turned to face him. "You are?"
"Sure." He moved into the room. "I want to know what she's going to say. I want to know what we're working with." He paused. "I've been thinking about the questions I want to ask her."
I stared at him.
"You have a list, don’t you?" How had I not predicted this? It made perfect sense for him to do so when I thought about it.
"In my phone." He said without any hesitation.
"I didn't want to forget anything while we were in the room.
Sometimes when there's a lot going on, you come out afterward and realize you didn't ask the thing you most needed to ask, and then you have to wait until the next appointment to get it answered. I didn't want that to happen."
I thought about the first appointment where Dr. Whipell's face gave away what she hadn’t quite said yet. How I understood, without having been told yet, that I was about to get bad news.
"You didn't have to make a list," I said, since there wasn’t much else I could think to reply with.
"I wanted to. You can look at it in the car if you want. Add anything I missed."
"Thank you, Daddy," I said, which was insufficient, but it was what I had.
He smiled, then gave me a quick kiss. "Finish getting ready. We've got time, but not a ton of it."
Daddy drove us to Dr. Whipell’s office, getting us there right on time. He found a parking spot close to the door, which was a feat I’d yet to achieve.
"Lucky," I grunted before climbing out.
He turned off the engine and looked at the building for a moment. "Ready?"
"No," I admitted.
"Okay." He opened his door. "Let's go anyway."
The waiting area was small and well-lit, which I chose to take as a good sign even though it was almost certainly coincidence. The reception woman recognized me and greeted me with a smile.
She looked at Daddy for longer than I liked. I didn’t want to turn into a jealous gremlin in my doctor’s office, but she was pushing my limits.
"You're —" she started.
"Yep," he said, pleasantly, in a way that was neither dismissive nor encouraging. "He has a nine o'clock with Dr. Whipell."
She refocused at his words. Forms were produced, which I filled out at the small table by the window while Daddy sat beside me.
When I handed the clipboard back, she smiled and said the doctor would be with us shortly. I could tell she wanted to say something more about Paxton Wells being in the office, but she held off.
Daddy pulled out his phone and tilted it toward me. The note was titled Grizzly - Dr. W - Questions and it was longer than I’d anticipated. I read through it as he held it still. I’d been too nervous to attempt it in the car.
He had organized it in sections.
Current status—questions about the progression timeline, whether the rate of change had been consistent with her initial projection, what she was measuring against from the previous appointment.
Practical—lighting, contrast, accommodation strategies she would recommend for someone working in a professional capacity, whether there were assistive tools she thought were underutilized.
Forward-looking—what markers would indicate the progression was accelerating, what would trigger a change in management approach, what he should know about supporting someone through the intermediate stages before significant loss occurred.
He had written at the bottom, in slightly different phrasing than the rest, as if it had been added separately: What can I do that would make the biggest difference for him day to day, that he might not think to ask for himself?
"Grizzly," the receptionist called before I could start blubbering.
Dr. Whipell was already in the exam room when we came through the door, sitting on her rolling stool with her glasses pushed up on her nose and a tablet in her lap. She looked up at me first with a gentle smile.
Then she looked at Daddy. The transition in her expression was brief and completely genuine—surprise, recognition, a flash of delight that she corralled into professionalism.
"Grizzly. It's good to see you. And you've brought someone today."
"This is Paxton," I said. "He wanted to come."
"I did want to come," Paxton confirmed. He held out his hand. "Dr. Whipell. Thank you for taking care of him. Hopefully it’s ok for me to be here."
She shook it, her smile widening. I watched her clock him, some of the starstruck energy fading as she decided what kind of person had walked into her exam room. Whatever she concluded seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once and said, "Sit down, both of you. We have things to go over."
She started with my eyes.
The examination itself was what easy. It wasn’t comfortable, exactly. It was familiar, which was different.
Daddy sat in the chair along the wall and didn’t make noise the entire time. I was aware of him sitting there, providing comfort while also trying to assess what he could from the outside watching in.
When she finished, she rolled back on her stool and made notes on her tablet for a few minutes.
"The progression has been slow. Slower, actually, than I projected at our first conversation.
" She looked up at me over her glasses. "That's good news, Grizzly.
That's the news I was hoping to be able to give you today. "
I held the word slow in my chest for a moment.
Slow wasn’t stopped. Slow wasn’t reversed. But slow meant time. Slow meant years rather than months.
"What does slow mean in terms of timeline?" Daddy asked. He had the phone out now, ready to reference his questions.
Dr. Whipell gave him a soft smile. "It means we're tracking closer to the upper end of the range I described to Grizzly initially.
Five years or more before significant central loss, if the rate continues as it has been.
Possibly longer. These things are not perfectly predictable, but the trajectory is encouraging. "
"What are you measuring against? What tells you the rate has been consistent?"
She explained it all to him. The imaging, the specific markers she tracked, the comparison against the baseline she had established. Daddy listened intently, making notes when needed and expanding on questions when he felt like he didn’t fully understand.
I sat in the exam chair and watched my Daddy talk to my eye doctor about my future, and the part of me that had been braced for a very long time began, slowly and carefully, to unclench.
"What should he be doing that he might not be doing?" Daddy asked.
Dr. Whipell raised her eyebrows slightly. "In what sense?"
"Accommodation-wise. Daily habits. Things that either slow the progression or make the current limitations easier to work around. I've done some reading, but I'd rather hear it from you."
"You've been researching," she said, as if the idea just came to her after the man had basically been interviewing her like he wanted to write a bestselling book on my condition.
"For a while now," he answered.
"He needs to tell you when it's a bad day rather than managing it alone and hoping you won't notice. That's the most important thing. The isolation of trying to appear unaffected is exhausting, and exhaustion makes everything worse."
"We’re working on that. He’s gotten better at telling me when I ask. Maybe soon we’ll get to the point where he volunteers the information.”
"I am," I confirmed.
"Good." She made a note. "Lighting—you've already adjusted at home, from what I understand, and in your workplace.
That's significant. Sleep matters more than most people with macular degeneration realize.
Consistent sleep, not adequate sleep. The eye needs recovery time, and it needs it on a schedule.
" She paused. "And he needs to come back every four months rather than six for the next year.
I want to track this more closely now that we have a clear baseline. "
"We'll be here," Daddy said before I could utter a word. Part of me felt discouraged to know I needed to come more frequently after a good checkup. But I also understood her worry.
Dr. Whipell looked at him for a moment. "You're in this for the long-term?"
"Yes. I plan to be here through every phase of this journey.”
She nodded. I got the impression she was revising something—her expectation of what today would be, maybe, or her sense of the situation I was in. Whatever the revision was, it seemed to settle her. She made another note and then looked at me.
"Grizzly. How are you managing emotionally? And I want the real answer, not the one that sounds like you have everything handled."
"Better… Significantly better than I was."
"Good. That's the other thing that matters most, and I mean that medically, not just as a platitude. Stress accelerates everything. Peace slows things down. Whatever you're doing—" she glanced between us "—keep doing it."
She walked us back out through the waiting area herself, which she didn't always do. The receptionist was on a call and gave us a small wave. We were almost at the door when Dr. Whipell stopped.
"I'm sorry," she said. "This is entirely unprofessional, and I apologize in advance."
Daddy looked at her with patient amusement. "It's okay."
"My nephew is eight, and he has been playing baseball since he was three and a half, and when I told my sister Grizzly was coming in today she made me promise on her good china that I would—" She stopped.
Composed herself. Tried again. "There is a baseball on my desk. I told myself I wasn’t going to ask. "
"Do you want me to sign it? For your nephew?" Daddy asked.
"I would like you to sign it. Yes, please."
He smiled the full version of his smile, showing off both dimples. "Go get it."
While she went to get it, Daddy tugged me close. He didn’t say anything, likely because of the ears around us, but I could feel his joy radiating though his touch.
Dr. Whipell returned with the ball and a marker. "His name is Demarcus."
He wrote on the ball carefully, making sure each word was clear to read.
For Demarcus. Keep playing. — Paxton Wells.
She looked at it and then at him and said, very sincerely, "Thank you. He's going to absolutely lose his mind."
"Tell him to work on his footwork," Paxton said. "Whatever position he plays. It's always the footwork."
She laughed, which was a sound I had not heard from Dr. Whipell in any of my appointments. It transformed her face briefly into something younger and entirely unguarded. "I'll tell him. Thank you both."
We stood on the sidewalk outside the office after the appointment.
Daddy stood beside me with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular. I stood beside him, body posed in mostly the same way, waiting to see what he had to say.
Thinking of everything he’d committed to already, I felt a touch overwhelmed.
He'd gotten up early and made a list on his phone with questions. Then he’d driven me to the office, sat in the exam room, interacted with the doctor, and signed a baseball for a kid he may never meet. All of it had been voluntary.
The word had been in my head since early this morning, though I hadn't known until right now what it was naming.
Voluntary.
He was here because he wanted to be. Every single time. Every version of here.
"Slow," Daddy noted as he took my hand in his. “Just for the record, I'd have embraced whatever status update she’d given. I wasn’t lying in there when I said I was in this for the long run.”
“I’m not sure what to say to that.”
"You don’t have to. Are you hungry? Because I’m starving. I was too nervous to eat a good breakfast."
A laugh moved out of me before I could do anything about it. "Then let’s get some food, Daddy. We can’t have you wasting away."
He was already looking down the street like he could see where he wanted to go next. "There's that place Auden mentioned. The one with the gumbo that apparently makes everything better."
"Gumbo at ten in the morning."
"You have bagels for every meal. Don't talk to me about appropriate timing."
He started walking, still holding my hand, and I went with him, because that was what I did now. What I intended to keep doing.
Slow, Dr. Whipell had said.
I was beginning to understand that slow wasn’t the lesser version of something. It was time. It was mornings with Daddy and appointments to keep track of my health. It was family and love, both of which made this life worthwhile.