![]() I usually stopped at around six inches’ distance. Sometimes, my friends would try on my glasses and say, ‘Jesus, you’re blind!’ I would hold up my hand in front of my face, palm touching my nose, and move my hand backward until it started to look blurry. At its worst, my prescription was -5 in my right eye, and -7 in the left. I was so young when I first started wearing glasses-maybe seven years old- that I can’t remember what perfect vision was like. The drops hit my eye cold and trailed down my cheek hot.Įveryone in my family wears glasses, but I always had the worst vision of us all. Something was wrong, and I was exasperated that the Surgeon wanted to wait until Wednesday, leaving me to worry all day Tuesday with only local anaesthetic drops to soothe pain. There was something like that simmering with the nausea in my stomach, but more than being worried, I was exhausted. If this had been my first surgery, I would have panicked. My brother looked at my eye and confirmed that I wasn’t crazy: my pupil was not round. My vision was so bad that I didn’t trust what I was seeing. My right eye pupil was normal, round the left a soft-edged square. I was used to that happening post-surgery, but what I wasn’t expecting to see was a misshapen pupil. What was usually an olive green was now emerald. Burst capillaries coloured the white of my eye red, making the green of my iris startling. I got up close to the mirror, peeled off the eye guard, and inspected my eye. Without my sunglasses, I winced even in weak light. Still I had to wear sunglasses indoors over my eye shield to protect against any light that bled through the gaps. ![]() I slept sitting up, propped against pillows, the summer outside my window hidden away by heavy curtains. The heat, like my face was pressed against an oven hob, eye streaming, the thump-thump-thump of my pulse behind my eye. That pain: stinging, red-hot, every blink scratching. Lying down increased the pressure, but the pain was so intense I could not stay awake for long. Once the anaesthetic wore off, I understood why I couldn’t go back to work yet. The receptionist will do you up a medical cert.’ You can’t go back this week, never mind tomorrow. ‘Wednesday? Can I not go back to work tomorrow?’ ‘The Surgeon wants to see you on Wednesday,’ the nurse said when she came to discharge me. As usual, my left eye had a soft, dreamlike focus. I covered my left eye, then my right, and could see that there was no change in my vision. My world was blurry, with a distinct outline around everything and everyone, my double vision unresolved. I knew when I woke up from the general anaesthetic that it hadn’t gone well. Elderly patients who have cataract operations usually report that when they open their eyes, it’s like they can see the world anew, like a fog has been lifted and what was once cloudy is now clear. The purpose of this surgery was to put a lens inside my eye: my cataract was removed two years previously, and now a piggy-back lens was being inserted on top of the artificial one. Two days earlier, I’d had my seventh procedure on my left eye. It had been five years, one month, and twelve days since my first. This was my eighth and final unsuccessful eye surgery. I laid there with a blue sheet covering my face with a hole cut into it for my eye. I couldn’t move for several minutes after the surgery. The Surgeon stitched up the incision and breezed out of the operating theatre. A speculum held my eyelids, so I couldn’t blink. The procedure took less than five minutes. ![]() I was wide awake when the Surgeon made an incision in my left eye, inserted forceps, and, with a tiny pop, slid the cataract lens into place. ![]()
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