Friday 11 September 2015

Post-operative

The first cataract operation was done on Wednesday, and my daughter was with me, to drive me to the hospital, and bring me back home, and to note all the instructions for eye  drops, etc. She was great.  I am so glad she was with me, and able to get me home and organised before catching her flight home.  It made me better able to tolerate the fright and the stress.

When the anaesthetic is administered, so is an amnesiac, so that there is absolutely no memory of the procedure. This is a good thing. When you wake up you are plied with tea and biscuits, and tissues to mop up any tear duct which insistently and independently overflows. My daughter sorted me out and organised everything before flying back home.

Yesterday a friend took me for the first check up, and it was declared satisfactory. I am not permitted to drive yet, which cramps the style somewhat, and I decided to have a quiet day at home, rather than trying to get to the Italian class and then the lecture. I cannot get to choir, or drive to do some food shopping, but there are plenty of places nearby, such as sushi, quiches, and there is plenty of food in the freezer. I walked to the shops to buy a bag of chips and other things which are bad for me.

My expectation was that my sight would be improved immediately, but this is not so. It is a gradual improvement. But colours look different. The better eye, which is to be done next week, sees as before, but out of the left eye, the colours are all wrong. How weird.

Even weirder was the fact that while typing this, the alphabet suddenly changed into a language with a non-Roman alphabet which obviously wrote from right to left. Now how the heck did that happen?
 I should stop now while the earth is still spinning correctly on its axis.

2 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

I hope the weirdness settles quickly - and the improvement continues.

Frances said...

Persiflage, I was thinking of you today while I was listening to Jane Caro talking to Richard Fidler.
Your feelings about the operation had reminded me so much of my older sister, in hospital at 5 with pneumonia, cut off from ... her whole world. As an adult, she spoke to me about the horror of this, a horror not addressed at the time because adults didn't recognise it.
Jane Caro developed panic attacks, other mental health issues as an adult...debilitating, but not severe enough to interfere with her functioning. Eventually this was tracked down to, yes, an early experience of hospitalisation. Images from then - a nurses (disembodied) hands under a night light, a toy monkey etc, became grotesque images that frightened and haunted her.
Just suggesting that these early experiences can have long tentacles.