It *was* a tumor.

I woke up that Saturday morning in late January with a strange shadow on the right side of my vision.

It was a grayish cast at the far right edge of the image in my right eye. Sort of like how the details fade out at the edge of an old photo.

Over that weekend, the gray advanced toward the center of my field of vision, a little at a time. By Monday things had transformed from a minor annoyance, like when you get some dust in your eye, to something that definitely was not going away — and in fact, it was steadily getting worse. I called the ophthalmology clinic for advice. They asked me a lot of questions that I later realized were designed to diagnose a detached retina, which is the most common reason for this kind of vision loss. But not mine. I answered ‘no’ to all the questions. At the same time, it was difficult to describe what my vision looked like, so a diagnosis was not in the offing.

That’s when the triage nurse uttered the now infamous line, “It’s not an emergency.” She made an appointment for me that Friday, four days hence, at the optometrist to have my eye checked out. The clear implication was that there was something physically awry with my right eye, and they could diagnose it if they examined it.

In hindsight (ha!) I should have said, right then, “I have to disagree. This is definitely an emergency. I have had a…