Al’s second eye surgery

Yesterday, while watering my garden, I saw two yellow butterflies dancing together, flitting among the four o’clocks and lilies! I thought, there’s two rays of sunshine, one for me and one for Al! On October 30, 2012 Al had his second eye surgery. Now the vision in his right eye is just as good as it is in his left eye. He marvels at the new world he is seeing for the first time in several years! He was beginning to worry that he should stop driving at night because of the stigmatism! Now I have to sit on him to keep him from overdoing! He is so thrilled that he wants to run out and tell everybody about it! We have already had several people ask for our eye doctor’s name.  One of my friends said she had cataract surgery eight years ago. She is a quilter and she could no longer tell the difference between black and navy blue. To a quilter, that’s devastating! I had cataract surgery ten years ago. The interior walls of our house are off-white. For years I had been telling Al that the walls were getting dingy and needed painting. He kept insisting that they weren’t that bad! After my surgery I could see that they weren’t dingy at all! I said, “Oh, you’re right, Al! They don’t need painting! No wonder you kept putting it off!” I almost made my poor husband paint the house for nothing! These three stories about cataract surgery give new meaning to the line “Was blind but now I see!” in the hymn Amazing Grace!

When Al was first seen by this doctor, after three hours of testing, the doctor asked him which type of lens implant he wanted. There are three choices, a standard lens, a toric lens, and a crytalens. The toric lens gets rid of stigmatism so that is the one Al chose, but he called it a vortex lens by mistake. The doctor looked puzzled, so then I said, “He means a toric lens, Doctor.” Now Al is dyslexic; since I have lived with him for thirty years, I automatically translate his “dyslexic speech.” I know how he got to the word vortex. “Toric” sounds like “torque”, which is a two-dimensional circular force, and a “vortex” is a three-dimensional circular force. Well, when the doctor realized what Al was talking about, he started laughing! “Vortex lens,” he said. “That ought to give you x-ray vision!”  I just love a doctor with a sense of humor! Al immediately quipped, “Every little boy wants x-ray vision.” When Al was in the pre-op room for his first surgery, he jokingly asked the doctor, “Do you have my vortex lens ready?” and we all laughed again! I said, “I can’t wait till someone invents a vortex lens with X-ray vision! I want one of those!”  

Pictures show the first blooms of the season on the red bougainvillea, which first bloomed on October 16, 2012, the day of Al’s first eye surgery. I love to look at them against the clear blue sky! There is a close-up of a single bloom. The other pictures show the fuchsia bougainvillea. Al raised it from a tiny three foot plant and now it’s as tall as our house. My sister gave it to us as an anniversary present. I guess the longer we stay married, the bigger it grows!