[Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.
Part IV can be found here.]
I can’t remember much about the drive home from the surgery, except that I was tired and some combination of relieved and apprehensive. My eyesight hadn’t cleared from the surgery yet, but this was expected. I’d read – both in the handouts the surgeon had given me and also in material from other doctors – that by the next morning I might expect a great improvement.
But the next morning when I woke up what I saw was a thick fog, much worse than the day before and certainly worse than my cataract had been. Panicked, I phoned the doctor (he had a policy of allowing texts and phone calls and returning them in a very timely fashion). He called back quite quickly, and I explained that what I saw was a pea-soup fog.
“It’s normal,” he said, “especially because I had to do much more work on your eye than usual. It will clear.” And clear it did, that afternoon. Fortunately, I also had a follow-up appointment with him that afternoon, and as we drove (my ex-husband drove; I was a passenger) through the freeways of southern California, I experienced something remarkable.
I know that people whose sight has been compromised by cataracts often ooo and ahhh afterwards at how clear things are and how bright the colors. But I think that my sight had been poor for longer than most; I’m not even sure how many years but at least eight, and I don’t even really remember what it was like to see clearly. Eyeglasses really had not corrected it to any extent at all, and although I could still see colors pretty well (or maybe my brain and imagination filled them in, so I didn’t perceive much deficit there) I lived in a blurry world where all sharp edges were smoothed and almost nothing had detail. I knew trees had leaves, but until I got up close they were like impressionist paintings with blobs of color rather than separate leaves. Same with the petals of flowers: just blobs. The hills in the distance likewise – blurry, and the trees on them were mere suggestions of trees.
And street and traffic signs? Blobs again. I had stopped driving at night and stopped driving distances of more than a mile or two in familiar territory, because street signs were also a blur unless I was right on top of them – sometimes they even remained so when I was on top of them. I either knew the way or I relied on my GPS to tell me where to turn. I could see the street and the other cars, so I wasn’t really endangering anyone, but I was very much in danger of getting lost without my GPS and I certainly wasn’t driving at night, when the glare became a psychedelic light show that was interesting but so distracting that driving was not recommended at all.
And the supermarket, with its enormously bright fluorescent lights, was a booming buzzing confusion of blur. The signs in the aisles were little help unless I was a few feet from them, the labels were hard to read too, but I knew my way around my familiar supermarkets and had gotten used to the whole thing.
But this ride a day after surgery made my jaw drop. The hills of southern California were alive with – not the sound of music – but the sight of grasses and trees and bushes sharply etched. Even the dirt was sharply etched. And the branches of trees (not all the trees had leaves yet) were black.
A word about the color black. Things had gotten gray for me rather than black. The print in books was gray, which made it harder to read even with my reading glasses. The computer likewise. Years ago I thought my font color had changed and went to “settings” to try to change it back to black, and was surprised to see that it already was on black. Street signs and signs in the market looked gray as well, even though I couldn’t read them well.
I had forgotten what black looked like, especially in small sharp things like branches and letters. But here it was – so intense and so clearly defined it stunned me. The same with the signs. I kept exclaiming about the signs, “I can read them! I can read them!”
I realized also that I hadn’t allowed myself to really deeply imagine what it would be like to see more clearly again; I had had so much negativity fed to me by the doctor in Boston that I had lost track of that.
But even more importantly, this was different than I might have imagined. I did not remember seeing this way, even in childhood, and I had had very good vision most of my life. As a child I know it was 20/20, and for many years as an adult it was no worse than 20/30. But what I remembered from then was different than this. It was never as sharp, and the light now was overpowering, so bright that I really felt the need for the sunglasses I was wearing.
My theory now is that an artificial lens really does make a person see differently than a natural lens, even the healthy natural lens of a young person. Maybe most people don’t perceive the difference, but I do (at least, I think I do).
My appointment was reassuring. The doctor said everything looked good. He explained once again how he’d had to free my eye of the extra membrane and the adhesions, and he told me that one little bit had remained and he’d had to snip that part of the iris, and also that he’d had to “reconstruct” my pupil. That gave me pause, but he added that my pupil now looked great, and showed me my “before” and “after” photos.
Quite something.
So now my task was to take my eye drops, and heal.
[To be continued – more to the story, of course…]