Yesterday I had cataract surgery.
I’ve been half blind since February. Surgery to fix a detached retina left me with a blind spot and a rapidly developing cataract. The new glasses I got in June quickly became useless.
The cataract didn’t just blur my vision, ir wasn’t a case of being short sighted, it was refractive error that gave me double and triple vision of anything high contrast (like text), and huge halos around lights that made driving after dark nearly impossible.
Yesterday, they gave me a new lens in my eye. My GOD it was painful. It wasn’t supposed to hurt that much, but apparently the previous surgery left me more sensitive to the pressure and it was excruciating. I’d rather go through a whole mouthful of route canal than do that again.
The scariest part is, like the retinal surgery, you are awake while they dismantle your eyeball. This just doesn’t seem reasonable. Not even an anxiety med to calm my nerves. The surgeon shines a light into your eye that is hotter than the sun, and you can’t close your eye because it is prized open. All I could think of was the scene in “Clockwork Orange”. Then you go blind for a bid, then you can see again, and go blind again. Cataract surgery is a very common procedure with only a 1 in 1000 chance of something going wrong, but given my experience of the last year, I’ve had genuine fear that my eyesight is on the way out.
It was only this morning when I was able to start seeing the results.
#cataract #cataracts #cataractawareness #interuptedvision #dycp
