An unexpected detour

So, not quite as planned. I had my cataract surgery on Tuesday and what should have been a 10 minute procedure took well over an hour. The doctor, after the fact, told me that in her 13 years of practice, she had never seen a cataract of the size, thickness, and tenacity  of mine (isn't it fun being special?) and it complicated the process because my eye no longer has the structure to hold the new lens.

Apparently I've always been complicated structurally. Most eyes are round, but the more near-sighted you are, the more football-shaped the eye becomes. She explained it sort of like a hammock. You know the strings / fibers that hold the hammock at either end? Our eyes have similar fibers that hold the lens in place. Well, she said my cataract was so large that it was like replacing a softball in the center of that hammock with a bowling ball. Which snapped, and/or stretched a lot of those fibers so that they are no longer capable of holding the lens. She said she tried, inserted the lens, and I moved my eye and it went spinning out of place. So we get to try again.

Yesterday I went to their retina specialist, who looked over my eye, said that considering my cornea looks like someone played basketball with it, it was healing well and we just need to wait a MONTH or so for the inflammation to die down. Then he'll perform the workaround surgery of inserting the lens from behind and stitching it into place. I don't really want to think too much about that, because the tiny sutures that the cataract doctor put in are itching like I have an eye full of sand. But I have to do it, because right now, without my lens and cataract, everything is a blur on the right - but a brightly colored blur. I'm seeing blues I haven't seen in several years.

At the conclusion of the follow-up exam with the cataract doctor, I said to her that she shouldn't expect me to deal with my left eye anytime soon, my motivation is now somewhat lacking. She totally understood, and said that the cataract on that one is extremely minimal, so I can take time; I know now what it looks like when it gets worse, so I'll make the move when I have to; and she also would recommend waiting 6 months to hear simply for my right eye to finish healing before I do anything to the other one. 

So that means my regular eye doctor will have to get bullied into giving me a new prescription for a fixed eye and an unfixed eye, and if he doesn't like it, he can lump it.