cataracts

For several years now, the ophthalmologist told me cataracts were developing, need surgery in a year or two.  Replace yellowing old original tissue with shiny new, clear lenses.  Slice my eyes open? Pulverize and remove my lens with lazar and vacuum, slip the new one in place. What could go wrong? No thank you.

I got along just fine with two pair of glasses.  Long-range, arms-length to infinity. Second pair bifocals, computer screen to keyboard. Set glasses aside for reading and close up work. One hard case for the pair I didn't need at the time.  One pair on the table by my bed at night.

Seeing shadows across my field of view and assuming that's the cataract the docs are talking about I decided to go in and have the surgery. Seems like everyone in my age group is doing it, some people I know probably get the whole thing on FB photoshoot, just another afternoon's outing. I only know one woman who had the new lens fall into the interior of her eyeball, another whose doc gave her a gloves-off warning, things can and do go wrong.

Turns out the shadows I see across my field of vision are not from the cataracts, didn't go away with the installation of the new lenses. Doc says something vague about the cause of that. He makes his living putting new lenses in people's eyeballs, someone else specializes in the back of the eye where I got something going on causing the visuals. 

During a break in covid shut down sometime in the spring of 'twenty, I go in for the surgery. Twice.  Cut each eye a week apart.  That way if the first one goes horribly wrong the victims/patients still got a little vision. 

IV in the back of my hand. Veins in both arms can see a needle coming from a mile away, run and hide. May as well be filled with sawdust.  Anesthesiologist starts putting his drugs in and the doc puts his hand on my shoulder for a little prayer to guide his work.  It's my eyeball he is about to cut, anything he needs to guide his hand.

 

No pain but the brilliant light in the eye makes me want to squirm on the table even with the max dose of the doc's drugs.  Especially on the second eye I just couldn't keep myself from moving a little and the eye doc said something about it and for a long time I worried that maybe something didn't go well because of it, but both eyes work about the same now.  In retrospect, if it came down to a choice between that light and a painful procedure, I'd probably choose pain. 

Interesting drugs used for the surgery. My mind thinks its awake and functioning normally, but later I realized that I'd been totally zonked from reality for the rest of the day. Some say I'm zonked from reality my whole life.  Lucky that MJ waited for me outside, drove the old man home.  She pretty much drives me everywhere these days and I like to ride.

When things stabilized, next day after surgery distant vision blew my mind. The brilliance of colors, particularly in the blue range, subtleties in the sky that went unnoticed before. Grey day used to be just gray, now it is a potluck table of color and design in a pallet I couldn't see before. Sat out last night, watched the sky go from pink to deep purple. The old glasses wouldn't have even looked up that way. 

Pretty and all, but with the exception of driving, we mostly live inside about a ten-foot bubble and the shiny new lenses in my eyes will not focus that close.   Hit the dollar store for readers, thrift store for fifty-cent glasses and there must be a dozen or more scattered around my desks and nightstand. String around my neck gets caught on something when I forget to take those glasses off and roll over to sleep, takes two pair of readers, one on top of the other to comfortably read the phone screen. Reach over in the night feeling around for my water flask and glasses go flying in every direction.

If sixty is the new forty then is this the new Zen?