September 20, 2019
Dear Everyone:
I had cataract surgery on my left eye last Monday.
Everything went splendidly.
I’m still blind as a bat, but the blindness is much brighter on
the left side now.
Some people who have the procedure find that they no longer need to wear
glasses, or only need to get inexpensive magnifying “readers” for seeing
things up close. So far,
this is not the case where I’m concerned.
Things are still much too blurry.
Not that I mind. I’ve been
wearing glasses since the 7th Grade.
I would feel incomplete without them.
Actually, looking back, I now realize that I was unable to see well long
before the 7th Grade.
Sitting on the living room floor in the evening, I would
unconsciously inch forward, getting closer and closer to the television
until our Mother would yell at me, “Don’t sit so close to the TV!
You’ll ruin your eyes!”
And while reading, the book or newspaper would creep closer and closer
to my nose until the same thing would happen again:
“Don’t hold that book so close!
You’ll ruin your eyes.”
At school, I never really thought about the fact that I couldn’t see the
blackboard. For one thing, I
was always in the very back of the room.
Teachers would typically arrange pupils alphabetically by last name.
Being a “W”, I was always placed at, or near, the very last desk.
At first, I could see the board easily enough because it was high
up on the wall. But over the
years, my classmates grew taller, while I didn’t.
In time, all I could see was a sea of the backs of everyone
else’s heads.
In retrospect, this may have been one reason why I never seemed to know
which of my classmates were which.
It was because I never saw their faces, just the backs of their
heads.
Then one day, in the 7th Grade, the music teacher asked me a
question regarding something he had written up on the board.
I quite honestly answered:
“I don’t know. I
can’t see it.” Whereupon he
pointed at a boy in the front row and instructed him to change places
with me. For the first time
in I don’t know how many years, I was sitting in the front row, with an
unimpeded view of the board.
When the teacher repeated his question, I replied that I could, indeed,
see the board; but I still couldn’t read what he had written there.
The music teacher sent a note to the school nurse who sent a note to our
parents, informing them that I should have my eyes examined.
And that’s when I started wearing glasses.
And I thought, “Oh, crap! I
really did ruin my eyes!”
It wasn’t until decades later that a doctor told me I had an
astigmatism, which was the reason I kept inching closer to things to see
them. It was never actually
my fault.
As a teenager, while bouncing on the trampoline or practicing on the
gymnastics team, I would take my glasses off because they would
otherwise go flying through the air.
I did try contact lenses, but they were too uncomfortable for me
to wear. Later, when soft
lenses were invented, I found that they made my already light-sensitive
eyes so susceptible that I always looked like I’d just come from a
funeral.
So I decided to go the “Elton John” route and have different glass
frames to go with different outfits.
This decision was abetted by our cousin, “Perry”, who owns and
operates an optician office.
These days I settle for just three pairs of glasses:
One for general use.
One for outdoors, with removable outer dark lenses.
And one for the computer.
And now, over the past few years, I have been developing cataracts.
It’s just the natural course of living longer.
People used to go blind in old age.
Now we just get a 15-minute procedure, followed by lots and lots
of eye drops.
I currently have four different kinds of eye drops to be used four times
per day for the first week.
After that, stop using this kind of drops and only use that kind three
times per day for the next week.
Plus the other two, of course.
This could be rather confusing, so naturally I went to my computer and
designed a chart to keep track of everything.
Or rather, a set of charts, one for each of four weeks.
At the end of four weeks, I’ll be having surgery done on the
right eye and the whole thing will repeat for another four weeks.
Which takes us through Halloween.
One reason I never wanted to wear a Halloween mask was that they always
interfered with my glasses.
Or vice versa.
Love, as always,
Pete
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