I’m fully dilated, with a significant chance of future glaucoma, but none now. My testing is finished over a full hour and ten minutes earlier than was expected, so I’m waiting in the TV & Coffee Room for my husband to pick me up. It will be a while. A pregnant woman sitting in the light, undilated I believe, lifts her arm to sip coffee from a Styrofoam cup. The glare from her wedding ring momentarily blinds me.

My husband and I are perched on the very high end of normal, like my eye pressure. We fight, in bed in the dark, about babies: whether or when he wants them. I’m frenetic when he doesn’t specify and can’t see why he won’t. The cheese and crackers I eat under the unreliable glow of a thrift store lamp at midnight don’t pacify me.

From the TV & Coffee Room doorway, I note that two women in the Magazine Room dab their noses with Kleenexes at the same time. The woman nearer me uses a pink Kleenex from her purse. The other woman brings to her nose a Kleenex from the office’s box, stamped on all sides with the name of a popular brand of eye drops used for glaucoma treatment. The first woman is dilated, wearing sunglasses through which I can just see her squinting eyes. Occasionally those of us who are dilated will ask the undilated for the time. As far as our vision goes, we’re like newborns. We want reassurance that nothing has changed—too much.

The program on TV shifts from a teenager trying to save dolphins from being slaughtered by Japanese fishermen to a 2-year-old girl born in India. The girl, named Lakshmi, was born with four arms and four legs. A dilated man requests that his neighbor describe the appearance of this young girl. The neighboring man, who answers, is in his 20s and likely escorting someone who is or will be dilated. He says one word: freaky. The two men laugh, comfortable enough with one another.

I urge my eyes to focus on the girl’s face. From what I can tell, she is beautiful, energetic as a sun, eager to run circles around the mother who holds her. No pain or sadness registers on the girl’s face, although it’s possible that expressions of pain or sadness are edited from the brief clip of Lakshmi before the camera refocuses on the reporter—and my eyes, as open to light as they’ve ever been, can’t follow this quick transition.