Jimi Cutting is in a very dim place.

I don’t mean to imply that he’s emotionally depressed, though there may be some of that.

What I mean is that Cutting can’t see very well since a hemorrhagic stroke knocked him flat last summer and his prospects for improvement are unknown.

Maybe all he needs is some special eye drops or basic surgery. Or maybe he needs to resign himself to partial blindness and learn to navigate with a cane.

The sad fact is that nobody is available to tell him one way or another. The eye doctors in the area, as it happens, are booked up solid.

“Getting an appointment is a nightmare,” Cutting says. “I am currently looking at March for the soonest appointment.”

Cutting was the house manager at St. Martin de Porres homeless shelter when the stroke took him down — and hard — on June 27.

The 51-year-old spent more than two months at a Portland hospital before he was moved to the Marshwood Center in Lewiston, where he is slowly recovering.

“The therapy and nursing teams here are great,” Cutting says. “There have been battles with getting my blood pressure under control as well as learning to walk and use my left arm.”

With the help of a cane, he can consistently walk a hundred feet at a stretch now. He feels like his left arm and hand are slowly coming around, but what about those eyes?

When it comes to that part of his recovery, Cutting languishes in mystery.

His eyesight was never good, he says, and the stroke just made it worse. The whole world is a blur right now and trying to communicate with people through traditional means is a challenge.

“My eyesight and ability to use a phone is really compromised,” he says. “I use voice-to-text as much as I can but that’s not reliable either.”

Why can’t he get into see an eye specialist sooner? Why can’t he find out sooner rather than later what his future holds?

Come on, now. You know the drill.

Cutting can’t get an appointment because there aren’t enough eye doctors to go around — just like there aren’t enough regular doctors or veterinarians or plumbers.

We’ve all been through this at one point or another over the past few years. Your 15-year-old tabby badly needs treatment, but can you get a simple appointment with a vet?

Nossir. They’re all booked up months in advance and it might be a half year until someone can squeeze you in.

Plenty of people are scrambling to find personal physicians now — just for basic checkups and such, mind you — and finding out they may have to wait a long while and then travel far from home to get one.

Getting anything done that requires a professional now is a bit of a trick. Some say it’s all due to COVID and the massive strain the pandemic put on the various systems.

Some say it’s because people are getting too old and too many people own pets and blah blah blah, there’s one explanation after another and none of them sound very logical.

It’s bad enough for regular folk — I have to drive to Freeport to see a veterinarian, for instance, and to Oakland to see my doc — but what about those with more pressing needs?

What about those who are stumbling around, bumping into walls and tripping over other patients at the rehab facility because their eyes are shot and they don’t know if this is a temporary condition or if they should start learning to read Braille.

What I know is this. If my eyesight were badly diminished, as Cutting’s is, I’d spend every hour of every day fretting about it. I’d want answers like yesterday and when I failed to get them, I’d probably start flinging furniture, yelling at lamps and weeping in a corner.

Of all of our senses, is any so intensely personal and so fundamentally advantageous as the eyesight?

So Cutting waits and waits. He strives to move forward with his recovery, but it’s hard when he has no idea if his eyes will be part of that recovery. It’s the not knowing that makes for long days and fitful nights.

Meanwhile, the job at the shelter for which he was so celebrated is no longer there. A short time ago, he got a letter of separation. The shelter, which caters to down-on-their-luck men, has needs that simply outpace Cutting’s recovery.

“I mean I’ve been out of work a long time,” he says, saturnine yet understanding. “They can’t hold the position forever. There’s no hard feelings either way.”

The good news is that while Cutting waits for news about his eyes, he doesn’t wait alone.

Since the beginning, Cutting says, he has been extremely well supported by his friends and the community at large. He tries to name all of those who have helped him, but soon discovers that the list is too long.

City leaders have come to visit and to provide whatever helped Cutting needed in the moment. Workers from other shelters have been around from the very start, either just to visit or to run errands.

His ex-wife has helped him. So have his friends from the Facebook group Lewiston Matters. His co-workers have been by, bringing him food or news from home.

Amy Sanchez, who runs a pet food pantry, brought Cutting’s son to see him. She also did his laundry and packed up his apartment.

These people went to see him when Cutting was at the Portland hospital and they go to see him now that he’s at Marshwood for the foreseeable future.

“Getting visits from folks,” Cutting says, “has really made a big difference.”

Cutting knows he is blessed to have so many friends — and some strangers — supporting him. That fact helps cheer him on one of his bad days — like the day he started to call his mother, forgetting momentarily that she had died in the spring.

Cutting is presently awaiting the arrival of a new wheelchair. In that, he’ll be able to get around more adeptly. Maybe when people come to visit now, Cutting can greet them at the door.

Will he be able to see their smiling faces when those visitors come in? Will he be able to look them in their eyes and thank them for what they’ve done for him?

All of that remains to be seen.

Best Cutting can do is to let us all know in three months when he finds out for himself.

Searching for more LaFlamme? Check out his mini column, “Cherchez LaFlamme,” which runs in both the Auburn Now and Lewiston Now newsletters.