When the doctor came in he got right to business. It turns out they did not knock me out. That didn\u2019t seem to matter however because while I was fully conscious, I couldn\u2019t feel anything on my eye. My field of view was very bright and colorful and reminded me of a 60\u2019s era light show. In the center of it all was a squished looking white hexagon. I could tell he was doing things but I had no idea what they were. After a really short period of time he said, \u201cWell, there you go.\u201d and he was off. The nurses wheeled me back to the recovery room, disentangled me from all the wires and tubes, and got me into a wheel chair to take me out to the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karen got me home ok. My eye was extremely dilated. They had warned me to bring sun glasses, but the brightness was even beyond that. There were halos around everything and a misty kind of softness. They told me I should expect that and that my vision would get better every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After I started seeing properly in my right eye I didn\u2019t need glasses for it at all for my distance vision and I could see better with it than the \u201ccorrected\u201d left eye. None of my glasses helped me. The old glasses corrected the eye that wasn\u2019t operated on but the new eye was made blurry from the old lenses. But if I didn\u2019t use the glasses, my left eye was blurry. I still needed glasses to see my computer but did not have a new prescription for my right eye. That made my right eye blurry whenever I was typing and I had to keep it closed. An interesting thing happened with the reading prescription though. My left and right eye didn\u2019t match for my near vision but there was only about two inches difference between where they focused. If I placed whatever I was reading halfway between the two focal distances, I could achieve acceptable focus in both eyes. As time went on, putting my distance glasses on worked pretty well for correcting the computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was 2 weeks between my two operations. By this time it was getting a little tiresome because of the mismatch between the left and the right eyes. And I was really anticipating getting better vision in the second eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The procedure was almost exactly the same as the first time, but it took them a little longer to get started. They did say that they put something in the IV drip to help me relax. I suppose they also did that the first time, but I didn\u2019t remember them saying anything then. My fault or theirs, your pick. The dilation seemed to hang on longer on this eye but it eventually did go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A week later I had a second followup appointment with Dr Heying. He said he didn\u2019t want to prescribe any new glasses for several weeks to let my eyes heal and adjust as much as possible. We decided that I would get a couple of pairs of reading glasses at the drug store, one for my computer and one for my phone or up close reading. A day or two later I noticed that that was a fairly successful approach. He gave me a useful pointer into which power of glasses to get. He said if I divided the number \u201c1\u201d by the distance in meters from my eye to what I wanted to see clearly, it would tell me the diopter strength of the glasses I would need. So Karen got out the pull tape and came up with 2.25 diopters for my computer glasses and 3.00 diopters to see my phone or read a book. But when we got to the store I was presented with two problems; they were out of stock of both those powers and my eyes still needed a little fine tuning anyway. So by trying on stronger and weaker glasses for each of my calculated focal lengths, I found the right prescriptions eventually, the time honored way that people have always bought \u201ccheaters\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in. Cataract Surgery I have been luckier than many people since I didn\u2019t need any kind of glasses till I was 50 years old. But by then I started needing some low-powered reading glasses. The inexpensive ones you can get at … Continue reading
At the ButchieBoy main page click the \u201cStoryWorth\u201d category to see the rest of the entries.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"