This morning I awakened abruptly around 2:00am to a loud  roaring noise.  At first I thought my shelf stereo had malfunctioned horribly.   It checked out okay.  Then I thought maybe there were  jets or black helicopters circling overhead.  Nope. Then I noticed my neighbor’s porch lights on, and thought maybe something odd was going on over there.  Also nope.

I finally figured out that the cats had managed to turn on my vacuum cleaner, which I store on the porch of my 10×12 foot cabin.  I pulled on a pair of jeans, padded out to the porch and unplugged the sucker.  Blessed silence.

And my neighbor’s porch light went off.

I kinda got spoiled, I guess, since the left eye went from 20/800 to 20/20 almost overnight.  The right eye has been stubborn, however.  The inflammation is still evident, so much so that  my local eye doc told me to double the steroid dosage–um, I may be repeating myself. 

I mentioned this to Kathy the other day and she replied “No wonder, the way the surgeon was digging around in there,” or words to that effect.  WINCE! when I heard that.  I’m a sissy when it comes to my eyes. I am hopeful this will be largely cleared up by Friday, when I go in to see the doctor again.

Meanwhile, the Course in Miracles lesson I have been working on lately is Number 27  – “Above all else, I want to see.”  It seems to resonate.

Now that I have something resembling normal vision due to  wildly successful cataract surgery, I have having  lots of fun shopping for cheap sunglasses.  I need them, since I have so much inflammation and photosensitivity, my eye doc doubled up my steroid dosage and prescribed another drug to deal witht the side effects from the steroids.

Anyway, I was at this box store up the hill  from my cabin (Three Bears Alaska), and I found a  pair of amber aviator sunglasses.  I bought’em, wore them a few times when it was overcast.  Felt like Joe Cool.

Then I got my hair cut short, and the big-lensed shades didn’t look right.  As I was re-attaching the original $8.99 price tag and attaching my own $5 price tag, I noticed the rhinestones set into the temple pieces.  Evidently, they were women’s sunglasses, which might explain why they didn’t look right on me..

Cut to my stand, this little retail biz I run out of my Mazda MPV.  A man my age stopped, looked at some Schrade Old Timers I had on sale, and tried on the shades.  He liked them, but passed when it turned out they didn’t fold up small enough to fit into a glasses case.

He came back a few hours later and asked me what I would take for my jacket, this garish red, which, and blue thing I wear as a joke.  He gave me $15 for it.

And $3 for the shades.

Which I had originally paid $1.99 for.

I had gotten the jacket out of the dumpster.

Boy, talk aboiut unintended consequences.  I sorata expected the surgery to improve my vusion–never dreamed it would literally cure my near-sightedness, but it did.  A life-long eyeglass addict, I am typing this wearing 1.5 diopter reading glasses–I use 2.5s to read, and can  drive and watch TV with no glasses at all.  This is an amazingly big deal, considering that all my life, I was fearful of losing my glasses.  But still another and greater unintended improvement has come up.

It seems that as the catarat had been growing, and my sight waning, I was becomng more and more emotionally withdrawn.  And considering that I was “the most macho” man that Kanthy had ever met, she told me early on, I was pretty closed-down to start with.  Anyway, now I relallize that over the years, as I lost vision, I became more defensive, embattled, was under constant tension that I was not even aware of.

Talking to Kathy about this right after the surgery, she told me that she used to wonder why I would get upset over small things.  And I did–my gosh, I am ashamed to think of how I snapped out at  everyone  from Kathy to business associates , for very little reason.  Now that the cataract is gone (actually, there were two, but the left eye was a stage one, which just knocked my corrected vision down to 20/30 from 20/20), I am more tolerant, easy-going, compassionate, at ease with the world, and confident.

One of my customers who works at the local laundromat said she hardly recognized me, mainly because the tension was gone from my face.  She added that I now look ten to twenty years younger, which gratifies my ego immensely.  I know, I’m pathetic.

I am also happy.  So happy.  I just look at things–anything–and smile and laugh.  Yesterday, I caught myself  literally cackling–just for the fun of it.  And I am still getting used to this–every now and then, I get this odd fleeting sensation of “wrongness”–that is–”I can see and I’m not wearing glasses–what’s going on?”

 If I stay in this exalted mood, I may even forgive the manager of the Hampton Inn, the hotel from Heck, who grossly mistreated my wife and myself when we were easy targets–I was weakened from surgery, Kathy from the drive and her many chronic ailments.

On second thought, I will forgive her when the hotel lives up to its promise (“We want you to be satisfied, or we don’t want you to pay”)–and that will never happen.

Our three-day, two-night trip to Anchorage for my surgery was rough.  We knew it would be.  What we did not know was that the manager of the hotel we stayed in was–in my wife’s words–”a red-headed pit bull.”  We did not know  how hellish the hotel stay would be.

See, the hotel brags a lot about how they want their customers to be happy.  They put it in writing–if you are not satisfied, we don’t want you to pay.  This is a huge lie.  An egregious lie. An actionable lie, I think.

We had a list of abut a dozen things we really hated about the hotel.  They ranged from the near-fatal–no vent in the bathroom + glazed tile flooring = a near-fatal bathroom fall on the slippy floor–to the merely really annoying, like the treatment my wife had to endure from the staff, or the HVAC system that would wake the dead, so we stifled in an airless room. (Traffic noise and air pollution kept us from keeping the window open all the way.) Listing everything would be tedious and depressing.

The manager ignored all my complaints and  bored in on my wife, who is disabled due to several chronic ailments.  The women was so hostile and agressive and insulting, Kathy had to retreat to the room to lie down.  After I literally made a scene in the lobby, the manager–Tami Long–very grudgingly, reluctantly and resentfully instructed the arrogant but clueless desk clerk to comp us for ONE NIGHT.

If they had any honesty, their slogan would be “We hope you are satisfied, but if you are not, we might refund some of your money of you raise a great enough stink.”

Oh, and the manager told us not to come back.  I think we will be following that advice.

Remember that name–The Hampton Inn.  Go there and be sorry.  Don’t blame me.  You were warned.

This is me right before the surgery.  I noticed that they put the little shower caps on the women as soon as they came into the operating suite area, but the men don’t get capped until right before they go to surgery.  We sensitive guys notice stuff like that.  Anyway, I was not a happy camper–I would have sold my soul for a Valium the size of a hockey puck.  The patches on my hands are little radio transmitters that monitored my heart rate.

This is odd.  Kathy took the pics and posted them here for me to write around, but one of them just vanished when I hit the backspace.  I better keep this short before I mess up some more.



This is the nurse doing something awful to my eye.
Seriously, everyone was great–except for the officious nincompoop who made Kathy put away her camera.
   

I will not apologize for the caps and all, as this is an enormously big deal.  Literally, a once in a lifetime big deal.  Here are the numbers.

Left eye (stage one cataract)–before the surgery, 20/800, correected to 20/30 (this is marginal, any worse, probably shouldn’t be driving driving; after the surgery, 20/20.  Period.  End of story.

Right eye (stage four cataract)–before the surgery, blind and uncorrectable ;  one day after the surgery, 20/100 uncorrected; two days later, 20/60.  I am told it will be 20/20 by next Friday.

Big heart-felt thanks to everyone who helped with money, prayer, and/or good vibes in general.

This is so awesome.  The cataract surgery went as well as possible, pretty much.  The numbers say it all.

Left eye– before surgery, 20/800, corrected to 20/30; after surgery–20/20.  Uncorrected.  Period. 

Right eye–before the cataract, 20/800, corrected to around 20/20;  after the  stage four cataract and before surgery, blind.  One day after surgery, 20/100 uncorrected.  Two days after surgery, 20/60 uncorrected.  They tell me it will be 20/20 in a week.

Right now, I can drive without wearing glasses.  This is an enormously big deal, having been totally dependant upon glasses for the past 57 years.  used to be, I wasn’t even safe to wlak around without wearing glasses.

I will always have to wear glasses for optimal vision, as I have   fairly severe astigmatism and presbyopia.

As it is, though, I am walking around smiling, happy, grateful.

However, it seems like my reading glasses are not quite right for the comp screen, so I’m doing a lot of uncomfy craning back and forth, so this will be all for now.

Thank you so much, everyone who helped.

and one to go.

Eye, that is.

I had the cataract surgery on my right eye this morning.  The operation was amazingly no big deal–I DID have a few uncomfy moments when the nurse stuck this hypo into my eyeball.  But heck, I’m macho. . . .

Seriously, I mostly didn’t even know what was going on even though I was wide awake.  I kinda knew when they removed the lens (they liquify somehow  it and suck it out through a needle), because I could sense more light coming in.  And I sorta saw a few sparklies and little flashes when they installed the lens implant.  All in all, much less hassle than getting your teeth cleaned.

Right now, I have no idea how well the opeartion went–my eye is still taped shut, which is a tad worrisome–I had expected it to open up by now.  Just checked–the numbing has not gone away completely yet.

Since the hotel comp center is open 24/7, I may update later if the eye opens.