New Eyes

 

 

Early this year my optometrist told me that he could no longer improve my vision by new spectacles since I had cataracts. He said my cataracts were bad enough that I qualified for cataract surgery and that I should think about having it done if I wanted to see better. It was an easy call; I wanted to see better. With an abundance of caution, I decided to discuss the surgery option with friends before blindly jumping into it.

“Nothing to it,” and “No big deal,” seemed to be the most common response from those I talked with who had experienced cataract surgery, some 70% of us at my age. I got the sense that having cataract surgery was a simple matter, something I could have done in an afternoon perhaps, maybe with a recovery period of an hour or so before enjoying new eyes with sparkling new vision. My brother said it was like a night and day experience when the surgery was completed. I confidently made an appointment for my surgery. I chose a leading eye care firm in Traverse City that featured two surgeons and a large staff that occupied offices full of high technology equipment.

It turns out my friends were wrong – the surgery for replacing my old cloudy lens WAS a big deal requiring deliberation and patience. At my first appointment, I had to make a decision; did I want the surgery performed by the white-haired physician who did everything by hand, or did I want the hot-shot young sawbones who seemed to have just gotten out of medical school, the one who used the latest laser assisted surgical tool “for improved comfort and precision,” the advertising pamphlet said. Of course, his surgery came with a premium cost whereas the old codger apparently plugged along with his scalpels and scraped by with whatever stipends Medicare saw fit to provide him. I was leaning toward favoring the old scalpel-wielding medic since he was nearer my age. The decision was finally sealed for me when I learned the old codger didn’t use the latest lens that would correct both my close-up and longer distant vison.

“Of course, that is the premium cost package requiring the use of high technology that only Doctor Youngblood can provide,” the head nurse told me. I got out my checkbook. I would be at the mercy of a clinician who had just learned to shave but was apparently authorized to point a high-powered laser at my eyeball and then turn it on. The nurse went on to tell me the schedule for my surgery. The first surgery could be scheduled as soon as my check cleared their bank account and my physician gave me a thorough physical exam offering his view of my chances for survival of the eye surgery. Then I would take eye drops for two days before the first surgery could occur. The following day I would return for a check-up, and then another a week later, and then another after two more weeks. Assuming each of these check-ups showed that my eye health was positive, she said she would schedule the 2^nd surgery for my other eye, after my second personal check cleared their bank, of course. So much for the one afternoon theory of cataract surgery.

My first appointment was four hours long, about the same amount of time Donald Trump used to plan his year-long campaign. Both my eyes were examined in sufficient detail to plan the surgery. The nurses dosed my eyes with eye drops and then made me look through a variety of eyepieces to see glowing lights, radiating circles, little roads with dots at the end of them and other images that somehow were translated into measurements of my eyeballs. According to one of the nurses, these measurements would be used to manufacture tiny lens custom-built for my eyes. At the end of my first appointment, the nurse gave me a schedule that I was to follow before and after my eye surgery. The schedule was for using eye drops: one an antibiotic and the other a steroid. I tried to tell the lady I am not good with eye drops. They shock of putting cold medicine directly on my eyeball has always been my idea of not having a real good time, especially since the schedule required dosing each eye some 360 times over the course of the 4 week schedule. The head nurse ignored my comment about eye drops and gave the eye drop prescription and schedule to wife Marjorie, she who has little sympathy for my squimishness.

A week later the first lens was ready for Doctor Skillful to install in my left eye, the one with the best vision. The surgery was uneventful, although I must report that I had some misgivings when the Doctor’s anesthetist strapped down my arms before rolling me into the surgical room. She told me not to worry; she would be right beside me during surgery, ready with more drugs if I needed them. If she intended to reassure me she had the opposite affect – all I could imagine was this woman lying beside me during surgery, giggling at my distress courtesy of the drugs she was sharing.

After the surgical team finished strapping me in place, Doctor Happyface began his business of slicing my eyeball with the powerful laser and then forcing a new lens into my mutilated eyeball. He began by installing a device like a spider web over my surgical eye to keep it from writhing about in its socket and prevent my eyelid from closing. It could not have been a pleasant sensation but the anesthetist and I didn’t mind. After that, everything went dark when doctor draped a covering over my other eye and began humming a tune that I vaguely recalled as ‘happy days are here again.’

 

Everything was blurry when the surgical team insisted I leave their surgical room for the next victim. I left with an eye patch over my left eye, and a blurry 20/40 view from my right eye without my glasses. After my surgery, I arranged to have the left lens from my spectacles removed to allow its use with the eye patch. I put on my now mutilated spectacles – my left eye with an eye patch that made everything blurry and my right eye peering thru spectacles with only a single lens.  Strangely, the right lens seemed no longer effective in helping correct the vision in my right eye; everything was blurry. It seemed as though my left eye with its new lens was now interfering with the vision in my right eye. Who knew your eyes could talk to each other?

The surgical center told me I could resume my normal schedule. They didn’t tell me my eye would be sore, that I would have diminished depth perception, that sleeping with a hard plastic eye patch taped over a sore eye was a pain in the … you know.

Over the next several days the surgical eye got better, but not perfect. I was allowed to remove the eye patch and I tried using my spectacles again but they didn’t return my vision to its former clarity. Oddly enough, my right eye became better at seeing things close up than before surgery but my left eye was too sore to notice so that things like reading or seeing a pickle ball was still difficult.

It has been three weeks and 300 eye drops since the surgery on my left eye. I can hardly wait for the surgery on my right eye that will restore my balance and depth perception, prevent the night time glare and allow me to read my computer. The final surgery is scheduled for tomorrow. I look forward to enjoying the full benefit of improved vision with the realization that having cataract surgery IS a big deal whose benefits will surely be worth the travails of surgery.

PS -I just learned that my surgery for tomorrow has been cancelled. The nurse said their  laser is on the Fritz and can I please come next week for my surgery.

I’ll talk to you later.

Bill

 

Columbus Day 2016

Columbus Day

 

Today, October 12, 2016 is Columbus Day – a national holiday that began in New York City in 1792 as a means to honor the Italian population of our young nation in the city of New York. No doubt the decision to honor Columbus via a national holiday was aided by the poem that we all learned in grade school: ‘In 14 hundred 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’

The rest of the poem goes like this,

               In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,

               He had three ships and sailed from Spain,

               He sailed through sunshine wind and rain.

               He sailed by night, he sailed by day;

               He used the stars to find his way …”

 

The poem generally lauds Columbus and his sailors for their courage, nautical skills, and newfound knowledge that the earth was round, not flat. Surely, the poem seems to say, the great sailor Columbus is deserving of a hero’s acclamation. None of us who were born before 1950 had any reason to doubt the veracity of the poem and/or the wisdom of a national holiday honoring the great sailor that began in 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress ordered the holiday, bowing to lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, who wanted a Catholic hero to be honored.

 

Now, there is a movement afoot to change Columbus Day. Some radicals wish to abandon this national holiday and replace it with a day honoring native Americans. What? Shall we lose another of our sacred heroes and send him to the scrap heap? Is this another instance of a cultural change which provokes professional football players to sit during the national anthem? It must surely be a liberal plot to … (you supply the reason).

 

Before we get upset about the loss of another beloved national symbol, a review of the facts is in order. First of all, historians tell us that Columbus never set foot in North America. His four voyages to the New World in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502 landed him in the Bahamas, Central and South America, not North America. Nevertheless, Columbus was first in what began as a whirlwind of European visits to the New World. (Indians would call them invasions, not visits.) Certainly Columbus’ trips were historic -indeed, his trips provoked in a change human history, ushering in what is known as the Columbian Exchange — the historic exchange of plants, animals, disease, culture, technology and people between the Old and New Worlds. The Old World, for example, got gold, chocolate, tobacco, corn and other plants while the New World got wheat, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, malaria, measles, smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases, all of which decimated the populations of native Americans.

 

For his part, Columbus profited mightily from his voyages. He returned with gold for the King of Spain that he stole from the indigenous people in the New World. He obtained the gold by force, killing and maiming natives and forcing them to bring the gold to his fleet. After they complied, he put them in chains and threw them in the holds of his ships to sell them as slaves upon his return to Spain. This turned out to be only partially successful – many of the natives died during the long voyage since Columbus was stingy with food and water. He threw those who died overboard plus any other living Indians that didn’t meet with his approval. Each of his four voyages was marked by increasingly savage treatment of natives that he incorrectly labeled as Indians since he thought he had sailed to India, not the New World.

               Even by the standards of the time, Columbus’ behavior was abhorrent, and by today’s measures both criminal and cruel in extreme. His notoriety for being the first to the New World is now known to be wrong – he was preceded by at least 500 years by Vikings who visited North America first. Sadly, Columbus voyage marked the beginning of a series of European invasions by armed warriors who laid waste to indigenous peoples wherever they met them. It is time that we end the charade of honoring a sadistic leader who brought so much misery to so many.