We're walking down 14th at 8:12 in the morning exactly. The Lovejoy Building is three blocks to the north.
Larry: "I thought you were supposed to be there at 8:30"
Jane: "I'm supposes to get there 10 to 15 minutes early."
He looks at me, knowing better. But he lets it pass. Yes, I made that part up, because even though I knew it wouldn't take 20 minutes to travel three blocks, I made us leave at 8:10. I'm anxious, not really scared, but I feel as if I'm about to board a plane, and you know you always have to be early to the airport. There may be traffic.
Cataract surgery is a "non-event," says Martha. "Susie had her surgery in the morning, went home, took a nap and gardened all afternoon." Or so Peter tells me. (Susie wasn't telling us the whole truth, of course, but it's a good story.)
And now I'm telling you the whole truth, sitting before my computer with my right eye, my new eye, clenched shut. More about which later.
At the clinic, I check in, and immediately the nurse holding a chart calls my name. I look at Larry with an I-told-you-so smirk and follow the young woman. But she is only going to take my blood pressure and put dilating drops in my eye. Of course my blood pressure will be dangerously, disapprovingly high because I haven't had time to breath deeply and relax before the band goes on my arm. And it is too high, it always is when I'm anxious and don't have time to calm myself down.
"Back already?" Larry might say when I rejoin him on the couch, but he's better than that. "You'll be fine," he says, returning to the sports page. I watch as the people (all of them old, by the way) are called to the double doors. These are the real doors, and it takes maybe 15 minutes more before it is my turn.
Many of the victims are accompanied by a spouse, I suppose, or, it turns out in three cases, a translator. But I set Larry free. Neither he nor I is interested in having him, god forbid, watch, and I will face whatever with my usual m.o. in these cases. That is, I, Jane, take this body I live with into an opening in time, wish it well, and leave the premises.
This time, I join a group of people sitting in a semi-circle, variously attended by technicians who administer documents to be signed, a curly elastic band with a key to a locker into which purses, and especially cell phones, are tucked. A green net hat is placed on the patients' heads, by which we can see who of us are the patients, who the support staff.
"Would you like something to relax you?" my attendant asks. Now there's a silly question. The stuff doesn't taste bad, nor am I appreciably relaxed. The minutes go by. As a single on this conveyor belt, I'm asked three or four times to move to another chair so that a couple can sit together. I smile at one of the Asian translators when I rejoin her after one of my moves. "Back again," I say. She does not respond. Oh well.
Larry has been told that this will last 2 hours. When an hour and a half have gone by, it's finally my turn to go into the anesthesia room. Here ensue the only truly unpleasant moments of the entire event. More numbing drops, and then, a hypodermic needle. In my eye? Yep. And it does hurt, but then it's over, a tennis ball is pushed against the now-closed eye and taped into place. "To soften the eye," it is explained.
So I return to the conveyor belt to wait some more. The tennis ball is removed. I wait. And finally, it's my name called by another nurse with a clip board. Into the operating room. Onto a reclining chair, which conveys me to a flat-on-my-back position. A mask is put over my face. And the surgeon, a Dr. Chung, who, it develops is doing this surgery on every one of us in the queue, asks if he may say a prayer.
I had been asked earlier if I would object. Would anyone object? Any atheists in foxholes? Wonder if Vik would decline. Anyway, if it helps this guy, no, I don't object, and he asks if God will guide his hands, and so on.
Seems my now immobile eye is taped wide open and the surgery proceeds. Strangely, I can see out of the eye, at first, before they remove the original-equipment lens. A new lens in inserted. This whole operation takes, including the prayer, no more than four minutes. No wonder he can do fifty of them a morning.
They assist me to my feet, my eye now taped shut, and I wobble out to the waiting room where I am given my choice of two "gifts!" How strange. But since I have been so accommodating in moving about the room earlier, I may have both gifts. A coffee mug and a velour vest.
I have had my share of surgeries, and have never before been given a mug or a vest. It makes me laugh, but I take them. Out the door and there's Larry to walk me home.
Now I'm sitting at my computer, as I said, operating with my left (old) eye because I need my glasses to see to type. But while I will need reading glasses with my right eye, not with my existing prescription. And I have two more things to say at this time:
1. It's true that everything suddenly seems brighter, colors more intense. But what's odd, is that the colors have acquired a new hue. Take away the yellow tone and what was taupe becomes gray. The coverlet on our bed, which I feared was the wrong color, turns out to be the correct color. And I'm entertaining myself by closing the good eye, looking at an object, then changing eyes and admiring the new effect. This little play will last only another few days, before I have eye number two repaired, and I suppose I will forget how the bathroom tiles changes color, the building across the street, the geraniums in their pots on the deck.
2. Well, it is a miracle, all right. Everything well-defined, everything clear. I can't read just now, it's too hard to keep one eye shut, so I listen to a book I've downloaded from Audible. I can knit with both eyes open, can watch tv (Wimbledon) and am astonished at how clear the picture is, even with both eyes, no glasses. But I can't type any more, so this report will have to do. One last remark: I discovered this morning in the bathroom mirror, that my hair isn't actually taupe.
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