Adventures with "Irma"

Y'all remember Irma (see "Well Eye Swear" post) That woman is forever-and-a-day amusing to me!! 

I had occasion, recently,  to drive her to a doctor's appointment  in the big city.  Planning for the possibility of a third referral the following day, we both packed an 'overnight' bag, and off we went! 

Her first appt. was at noon on a Thursday.  She was out in about an hour, so we had the rest of the day to kill & were happily setting out to do just that!  (Irma is the epitome of 'shop till you drop'!) First place we landed was Victoria's Secret!  Woo-Hoo!!  Then Irma heard JCPenney calling her name, so there we went, off  in another direction.  We no sooner finished scouting the sale racks at JCP's, that Irma once again "heard the call" from  Belk's.   In between, we managed to squeeze in some scrumptuous liver & onions for lunch.(Oh, how yummy!!)

Oh, guess I need to give you a little background......Irma's regular eye doctor suspected that maybe the retina of her left eye was trying to detach itself, due to the strange 'visual apparitions' Irma reported seeing with some regularity; e.i., lightening bolts, blazing, cascading spiderwebs, etc.  (We won't go into the animals playing in her living room rocker, like the iguana... that became a raccoon... that became her PURSE, just yet!!)  Anyway, suffice it to say that Irma's "issues" were beyond the realm of the good doctor, so he sent her off to the big city, to be re-evaluated by a specialist.

Well, the specialist poked & prodded, hmm'd and hummed, and did everthing but pop Irma's eyeball out & roll it around in his hands, and concluded that there was nothing physiologically wrong with Irma's eye!  (I didn't say so to Irma, being her good friend and all, but THAT sure opened up the possibilities of something mentally causing the problem!  Apparently, the specialist thought so too, 'cuz the following day, he sent her over to see a neurological-opthamologist!  (a WHAT??!)

Not to let a worrisome non-diagnosis get her down, Irma and I hit the hotel lounge just at happy hour & had ourselves a couple of glasses of wine.  (Irma figured if she was "seeing things", she may as well include pink elephants!) While there, we met a local policeman who frequented the hotel on his nightly rounds. (All the hotel personnel knew him by name.)   Irma, never having been the least bit shy, strikes up a conversation with the nice policeman & asks where in the city she can buy shells for a .380 pistol?  Mr. Policeman, not knowing of Irma's visual apparitions, is most helpful & tells her there's a gunshop directly across the street from the hotel!  She thanks him for the info and tells him "we'll stop in right after breakfast tomorrow!"

Well, sure 'nuff, after breakfast, we head on over to the gunshop....which was located directly behind a liquor store....how smart is THAT?   While Irma patiently awaits her turn, I am frantically searching my memory, wondering if Irma brought that pistol with her on our trip, and if so.....what's gonna  happen if she "sees something" before we can get her safely back home????  Luckily for me....the gunshop had no ammo for Irma's pistol.  Said it was a very popular caliber & the manufacturer couldn't keep up with the demand!  We left the shop with Irma mumbling something about  "just gonna have to get a different gun", and pointed out one to me that looked like something out of a Dirty Harry movie!  It was a western looking revolver type pistol with a ten inch barrel, that took a very large caliber shell.  Irma calls it a "cowboy gun" & said she thought she'd look into getting one.  (Lord help us if she does!)  I was relieved when we left the gunshop without her making a purchase,  cause I'm still dealing with the rude awakening around 2am, when Irma thought the red light on the television was the LASER pointer of a gun, and that "someone" was outside our window attempting to do us bodily harm.  She swore the red light was 'weaving all around'.  I assured her it was NOT, and reminded her that we were on the FIFTH floor of the hotel, so it was very unlikely anyone would be outside our window! 

We made our way to Irma's appointment with the neuro eye guy.  I whiled away the next couple of hours reading my library book while Irma was being tested for this, that, and the other.   Eventually, Irma came out and advised me she had been given a clean bill of health.  She says the doctor told her that her 'problem' of seeing "things", and "visual apparitions" was not cause by anything more than an extremely VIVID imagination!  He claims it's quite common, and that Irma does not suffer alone.  He explained that her over-active and vivid imagination creates the images she THINKS she sees.  Not to worry, he says. 

I wonder if he would say the same if she were HEARING VOICES??  Don't they classify that as some sort of insanity??  Irma confided to me that in researching her family tree, she discovered that she had ancestors, on both sides of her family, that had died in mental hospitals, after being committed by their families!!

How ironic!  Maybe THEY simply had vivid imaginations, too!!