Eye Delivery

Anders and I were snuggling on the couch Monday night watching TV, when his cell phone rang.  He answered, and had a pleasant, polite, brief conversation, mostly saying "okay" and "thank you."  I didn't even move from my spot with my head on his shoulder.  When he hung up, he told me that the call was to let him know some eyes needed to be picked up and transported to Tomah, a town about an hour and a half from where we live.

Anyone else ever get calls like that?  "Hey, come pick up the eyes"?

Let me clear up a couple things: 1.) by eyes, I mean human eyeballs; and 2.) no, Anders doesn't do anything related to the medical industry.

What Anders does do is serve on the board of the Lions Club.  Apparently, the Lions Club has something called an Eye Bank (shudder).  The Eau Claire members each sign up for a week of being on-call, in case any eyeballs get harvested and need immediate transport.  Anders says the other Lions treat this charge rather reverently.  In fact, one of the elderly board members offered to let him ride along on a trip once, thinking this would be some kind of treat.  Anyway, when the sign-up sheet came into Anders' hands, he dutifully put his name down.  And August 22 began his Eye Bank week.  Thus, one of the stranger phone calls ever to reach our household.

The thing was, this was at 7:35 at night, and those eyes had to get to Tomah stat.  It took me many minutes to be convinced the whole thing was really happening.  I kept saying things like, "but you aren't driving to Tomah tonight, are you?" and, "but the eyes don't have to get there tonight, do they?" and, "but who's going to take them to Tomah tonight?"  Finally, after speechlessly watching him call the lady back to tell her he'd make the Tomah drop-off around 9:15, and listening to his repeated assurances to me that he'd be home by 11, it sank in.

So, I tagged along.  It seemed as good a way as any to get some quality time with my husband, and being an expert car-sleeper I knew I wouldn't even miss my bedtime. 

The first thing to do was pick up the eyes in Eau Claire.  At the hospital, Anders left me in the car while he went inside to get them.  He came out holding a cardboard box at arm's length, which he deposited in the trunk (the back seat would have been too close for comfort).

He told me the nurse had seemed alarmed when he walked in and urgently asked if he needed help.  "I must have looked like I was in some kind of trauma," he said.  "I was just trying to figure out how to ask for the eyes!"  Yeah, not your every-day request.

It wasn't until we were on the way to Tomah that he dropped this bombshell: the drop-off location was a gas station.  Not a hospital, or a clinic, or the medical-research facility of a university.  I would even have preferred to leave the box on some doctor's front porch.  "I know," Anders said in response to my incredulity.  "Then the guys who come pick them up are named Tony and Guido."  (That part was not true.)  Naturally, I began to imagine a black-market eyeball trade for people trying to avoid the government's retina-scanning tracking system like in Minority Report.

In Tomah, we pulled in to Kwik Trip, still not quite at ease with the situation, and went up to the girl at the counter.  Anders couldn't resist prefacing his question by saying "this is a really odd question" (could you?), then asked if this was where one delivered "the tissue" for the Lions Club.

"You mean the eyes?" the girl asked flatly.  So that answered that.

We have now made it over halfway through Anders' seven days of Eye Bank duty without another call (knock on wood! knock on wood!).  Here's to hoping our fellow northwestern Wisconsinites make it through Sunday night with their eyeballs intact.  I'm all for restoring the gift of sight to those in need through cornea transplants and everything ... I'm just hoping it happens some other week.