I Can See Clearly Now! (Sort of)

Sometimes you don’t see things clearly until you are forced to. Many of you know that I failed my driver’s license renewal in Jan 2018 because a cataract I didn’t know I had prevented me from seeing one of the columns on the eye chart. One month later in Feb 2018 I had cataract surgery. Fast forward to yesterday when I went to my cataract surgeon for my one year post-surgery checkup. I’ll be honest and say I’ve known for a while that something didn’t feel quite right as my vision in my left eye seemed to be getting worse for the past 3 or 4 months and every now and then I had a sharp pain in it.

I found out why as I sat in the surgeons office. You never want to hear a doctor say. “I don’t like deterioration of the vision in that eye, let’s do another test”. After seeing the test results she said “well this doesn’t look good”… Yikes… next thing I know she’s telling me that I have a hole in my retina and I may need emergency surgery and she picks up the phone and chats briefly with a retina specialist (who knew those existed?). The pic on the left of my right eye is perfect with its cute little divot, while the pic on the right is my left eye which has swelling and that hole she was concerned about. Uh oh….

So I changed my schedule for this afternoon and mentally prepared myself for the two hours of testing they told me would occur on my eyes. As I sat in the waiting room I thought about my incredible vision since my Lasik surgery in 2003. Would I still be able to see clearly enough to work, take Mom for a walk, teach online and drive Joy, my really cool RV? Those questions were valid, but what I needed to see clearly is that I need to pay more attention to my body and what it’s trying to tell me. The pain in my eye wasn’t normal or just dry eye. This afternoon was incredibly scary. Three solid hours of tests and bright lights, and even an extra test the doctor ordered that included dye being placed in my arm that made me see everything in bright red for about 30 minutes. The retina surgeon requested the dye test because he thought he saw “leaking” in the back of my eye. After the three hours, the verdict was that the inflammation is too bad to deal with the hole at the moment, so I’ll be on a series of drops for a month to see if they will clear up my inflammation, close the hole and improve my vision. The doctor shared with me that he thinks the inflammation has been there so long that there’s no guarantee my vision will improve in that eye. I’m ok with that since we’ve at least identified the problem now.

This has been a great year so far as I’ve slowed down my schedule, am doing more things for myself and am getting more sleep at night. But here’s what I learned over the last 30 hours. I dodged a huge bullet and so far can avoid surgery on my eye, and I’m grateful for that. But I can also clearly see that I need to listen more closely to my body, and not ignore things that don’t seem quite right. I pray that at the end of my month of endless eye drops, I’ll be able to see things more clearly (sort of), cause it sure is better than not being able to see at all. I hear you God, and I’m listening.

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