beans and my left eye

My first harvest of green beans, picked and eaten on Tuesday. 

The surgery went well yesterday, no complications. We were there by 7 AM and home by 10. I had a weird dream just before waking yesterday morning. I dreamed we were still at home and Marc was watching TV and I noticed it was already ten minutes after seven. We have to leave, I’m already late and he was all meh. Anyway we got in the car and he was driving in the wrong direction, where are you going? He drove up to the back lot of a big electrical company, why are we here? This is not the hospital. Give me the keys, I’m driving. This pissed him off and he threw the keys and they got hung high on a pole where I couldn’t reach them but he had another set. So I drove us to the hospital and said I was a little late. That’s OK, the doctor is running late and I would be having a different doctor. What, why? We decided so and so would be better. NO. No, no, I don’t want a different doctor. Well he will be doing the procedure. No, I said again, and left.

So that’s how my day started out yesterday. Actually we got to the hospital here in Wharton on time and no, there had been no substitution. I checked in and they took me back to pre/post-op to remove my clothes and put on the gown which was huge, I mean big enough to wrap around three people. There was no way that thing was staying on my body so they brought me a small one. This was the most bare bones pre-op room I have ever been in. A cubicle screened off from adjacent ones by curtains as they all are but it was totally empty except for a narrow bed with only a bottom fitted sheet on it that was in a sitting position, no pillow but a padded headrest, no chair, vital sign monitors on the wall behind the bed. They brought me a blanket when I asked for one. The nursing staff was nice enough, we joked around, I initialed and signed all the forms, anesthesiologist came in and asked a bunch of questions, got an IV, gave me a valium and anti nausea meds, drops in my eye and they laid the bed down flat and wheeled me into surgery and that’s really the last thing I remember. I wasn’t completely out but I don’t really remember anything and then I woke up back in pre-op with a bandage over my eye which I was allowed to remove after four hours. 

The first thing I noticed after I removed the bandage was how bright everything was. I would close my left eye and look out my right eye and everything was the level of brightness I was used to. Left eye only, really bright. I had to wear the sunglasses they provided in the house. The second thing I noticed was the nature of that brightness. It wasn’t a white brightness but a blue tinged brightness that affected the quality of colors. Colors look different from the left eye only compared to the right eye that I was used to. My brother told me I would be surprised by how blue everything was but I thought he meant that the blues would be bluer which I couldn’t understand how that could be since blue looked very blue already. But it’s the nature of the brightness that has a blue tint. A cool tint rather than the warm tint of the light that I was used to. Which got me to thinking about color, the nature of color, the seeing of color and that probably none of us sees any one color exactly the same. And it made me wonder how this is going to affect my watercolor painting. The other thing I noticed is that colors were less saturated with my left eye only. I don’t know if all this is permanent or will change as my eye heals. This is one of the questions I have when I go for my follow up appointment today.

Physically, the eye was very bloody when I removed the bandage and felt gooey, like I wanted to rub it out. And yes, I have restrained from rubbing the eye. I have three different eye drops that I must use four times a day. For how long I asked the doctor, until I tell you to stop she told me. So Marc has been administering the drops. I don’t have trouble putting drops in my eyes but my vision in that eye is kind of blurry, easier to get Marc to do it. Speaking of vision, I have not needed glasses to read for the past four or five years, an improvement in my eyesight caused by the developing cataract. Now I can’t read without cheaters, my glasses being fairly useless. How much of that is trauma from the surgery and how much was reverting back to my pre-cataract eyesight I don’t know.

Today the bloodiness is starting to clear, my vision in that eye is improving some, colors still don’t seem as saturated but better, light still has a blue tinge. The color of my eye seems to have changed. I’ve always had very dark brown eyes which I attributed to my parents never being able to tell if my eyes were dilated when I was stoned as a teenager and young adult. As the cataracts have developed a light white/gray ring formed growing inward and now after the surgery the left eye seems bluer if that makes any sense. Maybe because my vision is still clearing up. It’s only been a little over 24 hours.

Had my post-op visit. The assistant checked my vision in my left eye, says it went from 22/70 to 20/25 and the fuzziness was because “you just had surgery a day ago”. The ophthalmologist responded to all my observations and questions. She says the ‘blue tint’ is because I’m now seeing the true colors, that the developing cataract warms or browns colors and I’ll get used to it. The less saturated level, as compared to my right eye, is probably because I have some inflammation in my eye and it will clear up and colors should seem more vivid. My neighbor’s house which has always been an unassuming gray now appears to have a violet tint to the gray, at least from a distance. Here’s another observation…my computer screen is so bright! Several months ago I was looking at the settings to see if I could brighten it up but it was at max level. Now I may tone it down some.

I have another follow up in 10 days.