Sometimes, fishing is just what the teledoc ordered

Once, the day before a job interview, a foreign object of unknown origins found its way into my left eye. Before long, the monstrous eye became the only thing another person might remember about me, and I phoned to reschedule the interview.

In well-healed hindsight, telling the scheduler my reason for rescheduling was a passing resemblance to Quasimodo might have hurt my job prospects.

It wasn’t the first or last time my bad luck in the eye department reared its swollen head. Once I rubbed sunscreen in my eye just before a family day at Disneyland. My fellow children ooh-ed and ahh-ed to “It’s A Small World After All” while I was left asking, “How small a world is it?!”

Once, a barn kitten attacked my left eye, causing the all-too-familiar temporary pain and swelling. When I went to an optometrist and explained the attack, he said, “It could have been the cat, or it could have been something else.”

I didn’t realize my best guess had to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold, but maybe the framed photo of his beloved cat on the wall presented a conflict of interest — the customer is always right, as long as no cats are wrong.

This week, I took time off from work to recover from a similar left-eye infection. Only this time, a friend mentioned that conjunctivitis symptoms might be a sign a person has contracted COVID-19.

Although I was reasonably sure my swollen eye had something to do with a lifelong penchant for sensitive eye issues, in a pandemic you can’t be too sure. I spent the night “researching” the connection between the eyes and the novel coronavirus, learning that even the recommended face mask leaves the eyes vulnerable.

After a quick call to the Teledoc, a prescription for antibiotics waited for me at the pharmacy. Steve asked how it was possible to diagnose my eye over the phone without a microscope. He seemed to doubt the zoom abilities of a Zoom exam.

“No,” I said. It wasn’t a video ZoomDoc. My appointment was over the phone. There wasn’t an exam, just an acknowledgment of the times in which we find ourselves and trying to do the best we can.

Then Steve reminded me of a natural remedy I had forgotten.

Years ago, the night before a lingcod fishing trip, my eye had swollen to the size of a golf ball after a bite from a no-see-um. Since I was among fishing friends, I figured no one would notice. (They never seemed to care if I was having a good hair day).

The captain seemed more focused on checking weather reports as we headed to a fishing hole 60 miles away, somewhere past the morning fog and across empty expanses of water where satellites alone could not predict the weather.

Hours later, we arrived at a fishing hole and began a drift over an underwater pinnacle. As I dropped my weighted jig, I remembered the captain’s description of jigging. “The best thing to do is just dump your bucket of jigs over the side of the boat because you’re going to lose them all anyway.”

I hadn’t lost a jig yet, I thought. I’m pretty good at sensing the rocky bottom.

“Hey, One Eye, watch your line on the edge of the boat,” shouted the captain.

I looked down at my line, which was, in fact, riding the edge of the boat. This oversight could cause the line to break if I were lucky enough to have a really big fish on. I made the necessary correction, but my pride was wounded.

“That’s a fish!” the captain yelled. “Reel!”

I had felt a slow pull that could just as well have been the lure bouncing off the bottom, but as my first crank of the reel bent the rod, it seemed certain I had a fish on. Adrenaline kicked in as my mind raced the reel to find out what species of fish would surface. With all this happening, I’d forgotten to leave my thumb on the reel.

“One-Eye! Don’t forget to guide your line!”

Abandoning my pride, I followed the sideline coaching of the captain and my fellow passengers. The need to use both eyes overcame the minor pain and annoyance caused by lifting one bloated eyelid. My arms tensed, my back ached, my eyelid strained. When the round body of a yellow-eye rockfish finally bobbed at the surface, I exhaled. It was my first rockfish, and it was a beauty!

In the next moments, all around me, lines were tight and various species of fish landed on the deck — lingcod, yellow-eye, black bass, even a mottled, black-and-orange, non-pelagic rockfish with venomous quills. The quillback was still being handled delicately by the deckhand when I had another hit.

“Lingcod!” the captain shouted, just as the gaping jaws and fanned pectoral fins became visible from the depths and the deckhand knocked me backward as he reached for the gaff. The ling slapped against the deck, and I stared in awe of the prehistoric-looking fish.

That’s when I realized both my eyes were open.

“How does my eye look?” I asked.

“It looks normal,” Steve said.

“The cure for everything is saltwater. Sweat, tears, or the sea,” wrote Karen Blixen, the author of “Out of Africa.”

I don’t know if she meant “treatment” instead of cure. And, I’m still going to follow the doctor’s orders, but I’m also going to plan a fishing trip just in case.

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