Raining stones

Warning: may contain whining.

2023 has had more complications than all of 2022, and possibly 2021. I started this whole journey toward cataract clarity in mid-January. The plan was to be finished by the time my birthday rolled around on the 31st. Ha! 

We know how that's gone. I had my second procedure last Tuesday, and as far as the actual cataract removal went, it was the picture-perfect operation that the first one should have been. Ten minutes, done. The thing nobody explained to me, and I didn't think of myself, was that with my eyes original lenses being removed with the cataract, and being substituted with distance lenses, I lost all close vision.

Imagine, if you will, my reaction when, not seeing my phone clearly, I brought it up to my face and it went completely out of focus instead of the reverse. Panic ensued. Loud, annoying, somewhat frantic panic.

Add to this that my sewing machine died last Monday. It was a 6-year-old inexpensive Brother machine, so not worth repairing. I ordered another one, and it came yesterday. We're getting acquainted - I have the seam allowance marked with blue painter's tape so I can see where I'm going.

Beyond that, our oven has decided that it will not go to any temperature above 100°. It did that once last week, and we turned it off and reset it at 350° and it worked, but the other night, we decided to put a pizza in the oven and the oven laughed. And laughed.

I will deal with that later.

Vision-wise, I had a follow-up appointment the day after surgery and badgered my eye doctor into giving me an interim prescription that I then ordered from one of those 24-hour eyeglass places - which do not deliver in 24 hours, but it's still better than waiting the potential several months until all the residual inflammation goes down and I have a steady prescription. 

In the meantime, some of the inflammation has gone down, and I am able to read and function at a closer level than I was immediately after surgery. There's still a fair amount of swearing involved, but I'm not sure if that's frustration or just me.

Progress, of various sorts

This past Friday, I had another appointment with the retina specialist, and actually got some good news out of it. 

I've been seeing pretty well over the last few weeks, to the point where, when I'm outside, I push my glasses up on my head and try to manage without them. The right eye (the one that had the cataract removed) has healed and stabilized to a point where my distance vision is way better than on the "good" eye, the one that has yet to be fixed.

So my question for him was, if I'm seeing this well with no new lens inserted, why would I bother to have that done. Yes, I'll still need glasses, but I've worn glasses for 50 years, and I didn't go into cataract surgery expecting to stop wearing them. And I'll still need them for close work, and 90% of my life appears to be close work. So why?

And he... agreed with me. He said it still wouldn't be his choice, but that's mainly because he'd like to get me too 100% clear vision, not because what I want isn't medically sound. 

But what I want will get me something that both the cataract and the retina doctors want, which is for me to fix the left eye. By all estimates, the cataract isn't as severe (and so hopefully will come off without as many complications), and even if that's the case again, now I know what I've got to look forward to, and that a non-optimum surgical result still gets me a pretty good result visually.

So I'm back to the cataract doctor in a week or two, so she can look at my progress and we can set a date for removing the yellow film from my left eye.

I thought I was going to have all this done before my birthday in January. HA.

But still. It's progress. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And it's only a little bit blurry. 

59. How the heck did that happen?

 

My birthday was yesterday. How am I 59? I don't  feel 59. I don't, on most days, feel 39.

I think it's the biggest trick our bodies play on us as we age, that our minds don't age at the same rate. I am continually surprised when my back hurts or my knees pop or - appropriately enough - my eyes don't work properly. Who said I could fall apart?

Last Friday, I saw the retina specialist and he was quite pleased with how my eye was healing. He reduced my eyedrops from four to two, and said he'd see me in three weeks (so February 17) to check my progress and hopefully give me a date for the second surgery.

The strangest thing is that as my right eye is healing, it's got better distance vision than the "good" eye, but I can't just walk around without glasses. (I tried, I tripped over a curb and almost fell on my face). No peripheral vision or depth perception (yet) on one side does not make for safe walking.

In other news, I've just about finished edits for Coming Closer, I'm making notes for the third book (because my head won't shut up), and I'm thinking that I'll add a regular book review feature to the blog because I've read so many good books lately it seems a shame not to share them! Also, many are by other indie authors and it's hard for them (us) to get the word out, so if it's a book I can genuinely vouch for, you'll see it here.

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.