It was dark, which I hadn’t expected. The room was so brightly lit when they wheeled me in that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then it was dark, and I hadn’t noticed when that changed. I could hear people talking around and above me, their voices muffled and low, as if they were trying not to wake me, and I felt little bits of pressure now and then. I couldn’t see anything, but my mind created cartoonish geometrical shapes to accompany what I know, but neither felt nor saw, was a tiny knife slicing into my eye. They were cubes, colorful and stacking on top of one another. Orange and yellow and blue, I think. It’s hard to remember now.
All very different than I thought it would be. I’d been anxious for a day and a half. Not fearful, exactly, but close. Like walking into the dentist’s office, knowing you’re getting the drill. I thought I'd be able to see the doctor leaning over me, and the instruments he used to operate on my eye. I thought I'd see the little knife looming, moving closer. I thought I’d have to hold myself still and let it, while every instinct screamed dear God, stop!
In fact, it was nothing like that. My head was strapped to the table, which I didn’t know would happen but, in retrospect, makes all kinds of sense. My eye was propped open, which I did know would happen because I asked, concerned that I wouldn’t be able to hold it open myself. There was a blanket draped over my face somehow, which shielded me from the lights. The medications I’d been given took over slowly, and I was both awake and senseless. I lay between a heated table and a heated blanket. Once I had managed to scratch my nose, I was as cozy as cozy could be.
All in all, eye surgery was quite a pleasant experience. I’m looking forward to doing it again, two days from now.
Cataracts. That’s why I had (and am about to have) eye surgery. I’m fifty-one years old, and I have cataracts already. Well, cataract. I had cataracts, now I have cataract. In three days, I’ll go under the knife again, and I won’t have even that.
They’ll only do one eye at a time, see, two weeks apart, so I’ve been living the last week and a half with one contact lens. Come Tuesday, that’ll change. I’ll be throwing all that stuff away, and giving my old glasses to the Lions, or whoever it is that collects old eyeglasses. But not the reading glasses. I'll still need those.
That’s another weird thing. I’ve been nearsighted all my life. Got my first pair of glasses in kindergarten. I could always see up close. Just put your nose right up to the page, no problem. That’s still the case with my right eye – the one that still needs the contact lens. But not the left eye. The doctor sucked my natural lens right out of there and replaced it with a manufactured one. Now, I can see distance like a champ, but put anything within, oh, six inches of my face, and it all starts to blur.
So instead of nearsighted, I suppose I’m becoming farsighted. I won’t need glasses or contacts anymore, but I’ll still need my reading glasses.
Fair swap, if you ask me, although I’m hoping in ten years the technology will improve, and I’ll get even better eyes. Both near and far sight. And infrared. Night vision. Telephoto. Give me the range finder option, and the laser eyes. Superman, not Cyclops.
And then bill my insurance. Hey, let a guy dream.
It’s weird, being able to see, even when my two eyes work so differently. Rolling over in the middle of the night and being able to read the clock, fighting off that sudden shocking thought that I forgot to take my contact lenses out. Then closing one eye and it’s all blurry again. It took me a few days to figure out how to read in bed again, before sleep. No glasses, regular glasses, reading glasses: no matter what I do, I’m only using one eye.
Seeing through a cataract was like looking through a smudged window. The world is so crisp now. So crisp, in fact, that I can tell I have another cataract in my right eye. The cataract I had in my left eye was much worse, pre-surgery. Like my eye was dirty. Like it had a yellowed smudge of grease on it. The kind you can’t just wipe off. As long as that was the case, I didn’t notice the much milder cataract in my right eye. But now I do. In two days, they’ll suck that one out, and replace it. And I wonder what the world will look like then.
I’m sure there’s good reason why we make people suffer through glasses and contact lenses, when we have the ability to change out faulty lenses as if we were changing the filters on a car. I wonder what it would mean for visits to the eye doctor. What’s the cost/benefit ratio, bottom-dollar-wise? Would it make sense for insurance companies to encourage people to get the surgeries, instead of the annual checkups? What's the risk/reward ratio? Just how frequently do things go wrong?
Regardless. All things considered, my quality of life is better now, it will be even better in two days, and it would have been better for the past thirty years, if this sort of thing had been available back then.
Maybe it was available then. I dunno.
More importantly, this crosses one of my big zombie apocalypse worries off my list. I’ll come back to that.
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