A Master's Degree In Chart Making?

No one told me that when you have cataract and lens replacement surgery you would require a Master’s degree in chart making.  No one told me that I would have to post each drop I placed in each eye and at what time, and that this regimen would go on for days before the surgery and for weeks afterwards.

There are three different kinds of “prep” drops necessary for each eye 1-4 times a day for three days before each surgery.

If that doesn’t do you in, there’s post surgery, when one eye is “post” and the other in the “prep” phase.

After the first surgery your eyes are never on the same schedule. So, if you are as panicked as I am about missing something I am supposed to do to properly take care of my eyes, you bypass the rather lame chart they give you at the surgery center, and make your own. That creative process at least gives you a clear—clear being a relative term as, post cataract surgery, nothing is really clear—idea of what you will be up against for the next three weeks.

A friend asks me to meet her for lunch at 12:15. I consult my chart- spread on the kitchen counter to calculate whether or not we need to meet at1:00 so that I can get the necessary drops into my eyes at least near to schedule. I figure I can move them forward and adjust the others for the rest of the day in order to keep the correct space between the drops. I meet her for lunch at 1:00.

“Let’s go to the movies,” a friend suggests.

“Wait a minute,” I counter, as I study the chart. What schedule manipulation would work so that I could get the drops into my eyes that are due right in the middle of the movie?

“Oh just bring your drops with you,” she says. I picture myself in the dark of the movie theater fetching three little plastic bottles out of my pocketbook, peering in the dim light at each bottle to try and figure out which is which. Then, assuming that I am able do that, tilting my head straight back and dropping the drops into each eye, mopping the excess with a Kleenex.

I don’t think so.

I adjust the timing of remaining drop requirements of the day so that I can go. In order to separate the doses properly, I will have to stay up far later than is my custom.

Eye drops rule.

My left eye—first surgery—can see at a distance just fine. Right eye lagging a week behind it, of course. I can watch television with no glasses of any kind, but I cannot read without glasses. I have “loaner” pink reading glasses, which never seem to be nearby when I need them. For out of doors I wear the gigantic plastic eye cover- ups they gave me at the surgery. 

At some point, I am assured, my eyes will “settle” and then the correct glasses will be made for my new vision. The glitch is that I am leaving town on Feb 2 and the optometrist does not expect the “settling” to have taken place by then.

So off I will go with the huge, rock star dark glasses and the pink reading glasses, which I will need to have welded to my body.

And I thought this eye stuff was going to be simple?

The take-away here?  Before any procedure ask a lot more questions, Stranahan!