About three weeks after the last surgery, my eye started feeling better and driving wasn't a totally exciting adventure. Oh yeah, I could drive, I just had to be careful because my vision off to the right was distorted and lacked depth perception because of the blurry picture I received in my brain from my healing, oil-filled eye. I have a powerful truck so if I wasn't poking along stubbornly in the right lane, I would have to memorize what the closest car to me was in the lane off to the right, identify that car in my passenger mirror before I moved over to the right and goose the car to stay ahead of it as I moved right into the free space.
But then my anxiety went into overdrive. My first surgery had failed after a week, but my second surgery was okay at the one-week checkup but then the next check-up was scheduled for two months away. I decided to move that consultation up to see if this delicate surgery was holding, in light of my daily effort not to strain myself or pick up more than five pounds, which was an impossible standard to meet unless I stayed in bed all day. For instance, my vacuum cleaner was in the basement; it probably weighs twenty pounds but I waited three weeks before I brought it up to the main floor for some much-needed vacuuming.
When I called for an earlier appointment, they gave me the first available opening, one month out instead of two months out. As my eye continued to heal, I saw or imagined all sorts of ominous warning signs--floaters, tiny clear bubbles in my field of vision, occasional sudden, momentary flashes of white light. The day of my late afternoon appointment late last week was totally anxiety-ridden, as all day I imagined what the doctor would see when he looked into my dilated eye.
However, the examination left me feeling giddy because he said my eye was healing nicely. Then he asked when I wanted to schedule the third surgery, to get the oil out of my eye. It would be like the first surgery, he said, where I was sentient during surgery and in great "discomfort" unlike the second surgery when I was out, but he said he would give me more or different drugs to put me in la-la land. The old good news, bad news routine, although this was obviously great news because the eye was healing and my sight was returning to close or closer to normal vision.
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