i bought a rooful external optical drive to use on my macbook air to see a cd/dvd from my doctor's office. Nothing shows up, appears, ... it is connected because it shows up on the sidebar of apple settings as cd

Hi there RevDrAJ,

To confirm, do you have another CD or DVD to try to play with the optical drive and your MacBook Air? You'd want to try one that works elsewhere, like in a DVD player, so on. This can help possibly isolate where this issue is coming from.

Also, you can see if restarting your MacBook Air may help. Restarting can refresh the macOS and resolve unexpected issues. If needed, the steps below show how:

Restart your Mac

* On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > Restart.

* If you don’t want app windows that are open to reopen when your Mac restarts, deselect “Reopen windows when logging back in.”

Those steps are from this article: Shut down or restart your Mac - Apple Support Please let us know how those steps go or if you've already tried those.

Take care.