Wow. I just got my cataracts removed! Don’t worry, it was intentional. They did one a month ago, the right one, and the other one yesterday. The experience was done semi-awake, or in a ‘twilight’ anesthesia state. I’m close to one anyway, so it didn’t take much. The drugs administered to keep me in the twilight zone include Fentanyl in an IV drip. This drug is kind of Valium like and also an opioid. It’s an ‘I don’t care’ drug which, like many things, can be nasty if not used properly, but very useful otherwise. I don’t remember much of the first surgery. I think they turned the IV up to a little more like a fire hydrant than a drip. I was in a zone, alright. But yesterday’s experience was surreal.
I went in for the surgery-Is it a surgery or a procedure? I can’t tell the difference from this side of the scalpel. Anyway, the staff prepped me, had me sign a library of disclaimers, detractors, and non-disclosures (oops.) They asked me who I was and my birthdate. Apparently, I got both right. Funny, I never get birthday presents from any health care professionals. Go figure.
They asked what I was there for, so I wouldn’t be surprised I guess, and put an ‘X marks the spot’ over my left eye. The doctor came by, verified that I was who I claimed to be, though he didn’t ask me my birthdate. Didn’t want to disappoint me, I suppose. Then he initialed the ‘X.’ In case they want to dig for treasure later, I guess. “They won’t find much treasure under THAT forehead,” I thought. “Suckers!”
They put drops in my eyes, wires on my chest, an alligator clip on my finger, a ring through my nose, and a needle in my wrist. And on we went.
The doctor joined me in the OR and said I’d be conscious, but I wouldn’t really care about what was going on, anyway. It will be alright. “You did this already last month,” he said. “How was it like that time?” “Um,” I thought. I hadn’t remembered much of anything, really, since I had been in a zone of my own with no visitors allowed. It was mostly a drug induced blur. The best kinds of blurs.
“Well,” I said, finally. “I was conscious, but I didn’t really care about what was going on, anyway. It was alright.” Then, “I think that’s what happened, at least.” Maybe I heard it somewhere?
He then proceeded to duct tape a big tarp over my head with a square hole over my left eye. “I don’t remember that,” I thought. Then the vision in both eyes, even the one reamed and refurbished last month, got very blurry. “I don’t remember that, either,” I thought again. Then he started to operate.
I saw, but didn’t really ‘see’ in any sense that made sense, something fishing around the fishbowl that is my left eyeball. It appeared to have some squishy, round stuff in it and the doctor was smushing it around, like jelly. Or huge fish eggs of caviar about to be smeared on a giant piece of Melba toast. Or the inundations of a lava lamp, only in many dimensions; real, unreal, and surreal; and with no preferred up or down, left or right, or back or forth... Or any of the other dimensions, known or unknown.
At the same time and in synchronization with the squishes, a musical note smote my left ear. It danced along the scale. A. B. D. C-sharp. F, briefly. Then back to D. B. I think it hit the Queen of the Night’s top C note once. I expected my eyeball to shatter. It was electronic and should have been eerie. “I definitely don’t remember any of this,” I thought once more. “But I don’t really care about what’s going on, anyway,” I decided in the end. “So it is alright!”
He said something about ‘putting in the new lens’ and the globules turned into a jiggly squiggle, the squiggle jiggled into place, though a richly blurry place, and the music stopped.
“You’re all done,” the doctor said after about 15 minutes of Moog music and lava lamps. He pealed the duct tape from my head and detached whatever else was glued on there, plus encased my left eye in a plastic shield, cotton gauze, and surgical tape. The nurse rolled me back to the now de-prepping room, got me some ginger ale, and post op’ed me.
Ten more minutes and I was out of the hospital gown, into my civies, and wheel chaired out to Seeth, who was waiting in the already running getaway car under the surgery drop-off awning. “Gun it,” I said. “Oh, and no alcohol for 24 yours,” the nurse remembered to add as the door closed. “I said GUN IT!”
I took the bandage off four hours later and started using two eye drops: a Steroid and an anti-biotic. The healing begins. Under the bandage it had felt like an eyelash was poking my eye and it continued to do so after I took it off. The healing tarries.
Two observations. First: Why did no one tell me the sky isn’t a mustardy grey and the clouds aren’t really piss yellow? Had I known I would have looked up more often! And second: I no longer need my 400 dollar a year, split pane, varying focus, precision ground, photo grey, all purpose, all weather (as long is it’s not raining, tornading, or hurricaning,) prescribed eyeglasses?
When I took off the bandages from my first operation a month earlier, I quickly noticed that the eyesight in my right eye was now worse with my glasses on than with them off. Even though my eye was blurry for several days and I had to put the drops in them several times a day, I still saw better without that lens than with it.
At the follow up appointment at my Ophthalmologist’s office, the technician said that my corrected eye was now seeing at 20-30 vision. Hopefully, my left eye will do as well and I won’t need to use my glasses for driving any more. “That’s great,” I thought. I assumed it meant that if I drive through a parking lot and there are thirty people there, I am sure to miss at least twenty of them. I like those odds.
They took the right lens from my glasses, so for a month I went around looking like a Charlie Chaplin gag. I liked to take my glasses off, clean the left lens with a Kleenex, then pull it through the (absent) right lens. Oh, and then grab the steering wheel again. Missed another one!
Now they are both done, and I do not need my glasses at all. At least not for farseeing, farsiting? Not for seeing far. The right one is still a little hazy, so I am using the anti-biotic drops and the Prednisolone drops in the left eye and continue to use the Prednisolone drops (from a different bottle) in the right eye for another week. Double steroids pump me up! There go my Olympian aspirations. Better not show up in Moscow airport.
Reading is blurry. Well, the left eye looks like it’s seeing through a haze, which it is, and the right eye is mostly cleared up. I got a pair of fourteen dollar reading glasses and can see pretty well in the ten-to-twenty-inch range. (Twenty-five to fifty centimeters when I am anywhere else in the world.) Take that, four hundred dollar designer prescription glasses. Hurrah for the (fourteen) dollar store! Inflation, you know. It’s a fancy word for theft.
Of course, I have to constantly put on and take off my reading glasses depending on what I am looking at and what is its focal length. In the grocery store the other day I kept putting them on to read the groceries on my list, taking them off to read the groceries on the shelves, then putting them back on again to read the labels on the groceries that were now in my hand near my face. I figure there must be an art to it.
You know, I could perch them on the end of my nose like a distracted professor, bow tie optional. That way I could peer over them, academically. Or I could wave them around, nervously putting them on and taking the off again, often at the wrong times, like a nervous clerk bustling around a warehouse with a clipboard and a coffee cup that says, ‘World’s Best Bureaucrat.’ Or I could put them up on my forehead and raise my eyebrows to make them fall onto my nose when I need them and just look stupid. Or I could take them off and stuff them into a pocket or leave them places I can’t remember like a scatterbrained uncle. Or take them out of my coat pocket and put them on dramatically like Doctor Who. The options are endless. Well, the options are five, actually.
Here’s looking at you, kid. Now where did I leave my reading glasses?
