Why Me?

I’ve been having a little case of “why me?” today. I just can’t seem to join the mainstream—always an outlier. Sometimes that’s a good thing, as in being a female PhD in the 70s, 80s and 90s, or being left-handed (you have to left-handed, too, to understand), or responding well to chemotherapy, but sometimes it’s not so good, as in getting a first diagnosis of Stage IV cancer, or being attracted to men who are mavericks, or being very, very near-sighted.


Which brings me to my current outlier situation. I just recently had cataract surgery on my right eye. This was a really big deal, as my oncologist felt that I should go off one of the drugs in my current cocktail before the surgery (for both eyes) and for some time afterward. Everyone that I know who has had cataract surgery told me what a piece of cake it is and how much they love their new vision. I was truly looking forward to this surgery.


Now the surgery on the first eye, the right eye, went really well, according to my surgeon, who said so, and to me, who could immediately see better than I can ever remember seeing with that eye. All was fine until the day after surgery when I went for the routine check-up. Uh-oh. Unbeknownst to me (except for that tiny bit of pain on the second day) something unusual is going on in that right eye. It was very inflamed (not infected) and had lots of pigment (somewhere, I couldn’t tell you where, but I can’t see it). Up the dosage of the steroid drops to every two hours. Return to the doctor tomorrow.


Next day, doctor dilates eye (again!!!) and says immediately, oh, way better. Come back Monday (this is Friday). I come back on Monday, and he says nothing during the very long exam of my dilated (again!!!) eye. Then he says, it’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’ve never seen this before. You just have lots and lots of pigment floating around, as if the new lens is scraping off cells from your iris, but I can’t see how that could be happening. Plus the pressure in your eye is up, probably because of all the steroids you’ve been taking. Back off the steroids and come back in 5-7 days.

But what about the surgery on the left eye that scheduled for Wednesday, two days from now? Oh, he says, having forgotten all about the left eye. We’ll need to postpone that. I don’t want to do anything else until this right eye is perfect.

So now, with an indefinite amount of time before I have surgery on the left eye, I’m having to figure out how to see with one eye that has (nearly) perfect vision, and one that is legally blind (but can be corrected with glasses.) I can’t stand looking through both eyes at the same time—it’s totally disorienting. So I have to cover my right eye in order to use my glasses. Or, I can cover my left eye, and see out of my “new” eye, but I can’t see close-up, so I need reading glasses (of which I have about twenty pairs of different powers of magnification, collected over the years) to work on the computer, or read, or play the piano. Or, if I’m just going to read, I can use just my old eye without the glasses by holding the book up very close to my face. And I forgot to mention that my “new” eye is very light sensitive still (plus it’s dilated about half the time), so I need sunglasses if I go outside or drive. But then I have to cover up the left lens of the sunglasses (a cut-out sticky-note works) , so that I don’t go crazy seeing with one good eye and one fuzzy-wuzzy eye.



But I’m doing OK now with an eye patch, reading glasses, my old glasses, sunglasses (with one eye covered). It only takes me about five minutes to decide how it is I’m going to see every time I switch activities. I never realized how much we take for granted that we’re going to actually see when we look at something. Now I’ve got all these decisions to make. But with one or more combinations of the paraphernalia I just listed, I’m making out.



But still I’m curious---why me?