Six days ago, I had my second eye surgery of the summer. Since then, until a few hours ago, I have had to keep my head down, eyes down.
When you spend that long looking only at people’s shoes, their shins, and the backs of their ankles, you enjoy the relief of looking up and being allowed to look around.
Sure, this head-positioning was only one week–big deal. For three weeks before that, after the first surgery, I had to keep my head angled down and to the right, giving a seasick view of the world. When an odd pocket of fluid appeared in my eye after 10 days, the retina doctor urged me to change head positioning, now 50% facing straight down and 50% in the previous position.
My neck and upper-back were destroyed. Screaming for relief. But, I knew that, if this was to work, I had to be consistent, if not perfect.
This was a lesson in patience and perseverance.
And then, a lesson in, how you can do everything right, and it still might not work.
Four days before I was to find relief in release from any head-positioning, the fluid had moved, then increased in volume. The doctor recommended surgery.
Frustrating.
The elderly woman in the foyer waiting room, probably just waiting to give someone a ride after an appointment, got to hear just how frustrating as I stormed past, surgery orders and prep folder in hand.
This would be my fourth eye surgery in three years. Not how I wanted to spend the remainder of my summer, but they were able to push through scheduling to give me two weeks to recover before I had to go back to school.
Then, the curtains closed.
Late on Wednesday afternoon, two days before my scheduled surgery, dark curtains began to draw over both sides of my vision. Over the next several hours, the dark cloud covered more and more of my field of vision.
The next morning, it was worse.
By the morning of the surgery, there was a faint yellow, smeary pinhole of light coming into my eye. Since I was not allowed to wear the contact lens in my “good” eye, I entered the hospital and prepared for surgery in a swollen-faced feeling of near-blindness.
Here was the one bight spot in the day, as it were: because two of previous surgeries were related to the early-onset cataract in that eye, I would not need the “buckle” procedure recommended for anyone with this kind of retina issue. That was good news, as the buckle would have caused farsightedness in that same eye. No thanks!
So, now, six days later, with my weary right-side eye, and vision nonexistent in my 14% O3F8 bubbled-infused eye, I am finally allowed to return to some reading and writing. What better to do than relive the experience?