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Front Porch: Surgery an eye-opening experience
Bruce has worn glasses since he was a very young boy. The big E at the top of the eye chart was not only fuzzy to him, he couldn’t even see the chart because the entire wall was a blur. We don’t actually know what his vision measured out to be. His optometrist explained that they pretty much stop counting at 20/400, so Bruce’s vision was considered 20/400-plus.
He was a really nearsighted guy who I almost never saw without his thick glasses on (contact lenses didn’t work for him). And then came the cataracts, the unwelcome clouding of the lenses of both of his eyes. By age 80, more than half of all Americans either have a cataract or have had cataract surgery, according to the National Eye Institute. Bruce started getting his in his 60s and now, in his 70s, they bloomed from annoying to intolerable.
He felt as if he were looking through a smear of grease. Nighttime driving was risky and mostly avoided. Reading street signs became more and more difficult. Colors faded. Cataract surgery was finally in order.
We found a good ophthalmologic surgeon, one who offered a laser-assisted procedure, and had his left eye done, and a week later, his right eye. When the cataract is removed in an operation that lasts just 10 minutes, a new lens is inserted that is custom selected to help correct a person’s nearsighted/farsighted impairment. The goal is to get as close to 20/20 as possible, though that can’t always happen.
Just before the first procedure, Bruce was sitting in the pre-op chair and the ophthalmologist asked him to cover his right eye and look with his left eye at the clock on the wall about 15 feet away and say what he could see. Bruce’s response was: “What clock?”
About 15 minutes after the procedure, he was again asked what he could see on the clock. Bruce said: “It’s 12:15.” By the next day, his vision in that eye measured 20/20. A week later, his right eye also emerged at 20/20. He is still in the post-op period now in which he has to minister to his eyes with multiple drops during the day, and in about two weeks will visit with his optometrist to see if he needs any corrective lenses. We know he needs glasses for reading, as the new implanted lenses cannot adjust for close vision, and he’ll need to decide if he wants to wear progressive glasses that are without prescription at the top and set for reading distance toward the bottom. Or he can just buy over-the-counter cheaters. We’ll see (pun intended).
All surgical outcomes aren’t this good, we know, as sometimes there are other eye problems involved, and there are always risks to any kind of surgery. And we do knock wood continually when we talk about Bruce’s cataract surgery and keep fingers crossed that no complications occur. But what this has meant in Bruce’s life is hard to put into words.
He is liberated. He is no longer helpless in his environment without glasses on and no longer has to fight to see through what he described as a layer of Vaseline. He can see bright colors again. He can drive safely at night. Everything is fresh and new.
And the icing on the cake – skiing, his favorite thing to do. Bruce had to limit skiing to bright sunny days only because when there were shadows on the snow, he couldn’t distinguish up from down, the horizon from the snow or any details in the snow beneath his skis. So last week he decided to test drive his new eyes up on Mount Spokane. Success! He could see the corrugations in the snow on the groomed runs and … well, he could see everything.
Our good-humored optometrist described the change for us: “In technical medical-speak, I’ll put it this way. You were blind as a bat and now you’ve got the eyes of an eagle.”
And there’s happiness in this for me, too, as I rejoice in seeing my husband feel renewed, able to see the world around him in all its clarity for the first time in probably his whole life. And instead of looking into his eyes through the opposite side of his thick glasses, which made them look so tiny, I can see those handsome blue eyes as they really are, undistorted and bright and shiny in that face that I love.
Of course, that means he can see me clearly, too; I mean really clearly, now for the first time ever. The comedian Phyllis Diller once said: “Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age – as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.”
Uh oh, I’m in trouble now.
Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by e-mail at upwindsailor@ comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/ columnists/.