Feels So Good

The Widder picks me up a little after six. There is hardly any traffic and we get to the clinic very early. I’m hungry; I was told not to eat before the procedure, and I’m groggy without my morning coffee. 

They lead me to a big room with a bunch of booths separated by curtains. An assistant with huge frizzy hair gives me a blue paper hairnet and matching booties. She asks me all the same questions I answered on the form, then gives me drops to dilate my eyes and draws a mark above my eye. “Feels So Good” by Chuck Mangione is playing rather loudly from somewhere. My father blasted this song all the time when we were growing up. It’s funny; there have been lots of jokes about Mangione on the internet this week because the young man who killed the healthcare CEO shares his surname. though they’re not related. When she leaves the music shuts off. 

The curtain provides the flimsiest illusion of privacy. They don’t reach the floor so I can see the upside down reflections of people walking across the shiny linoleum, and can hear everything going on in the room. In the next booth over, another assistant is telling a woman what to expect after the procedure. She lists the normal symptoms and ones that are cause for concern. Pain, excessive redness, bloody secretion. The woman chatters on nervously about her grandkids. I’m reminded again of how much younger I am than most people who have to have this done.

Doctor Mavis pops in, sounding much friendlier than she did during our sole office visit months ago. I had heard one of the assistants say she has thirteen of these to perform today.

She leaves and the anesthesiologist enters and says, “My job is to make it so you will be there but not care.” It sounds both sinister and comforting. He’s jovial but my anxiety is making it difficult for me to speak in more than monosyllables.

They lead the grandmother into the surgery room and everything is quiet for a long time. Finally another assistant comes and asks me all the same questions the first one did. She is perky and cheerful and sticks an IV port in the back of my hand. She gives me more drops, leaves, and returns with more drops. “We want you to be there but not care,” she says. This must be the clinic’s official slogan.

After a while the grandmother returns, still chatty but slurring her words. She talks about her cats and how they like to sleep on her head, and how she hopes they don’t knock the eye shield off. 

And then the surgery room assistant arrives, asks me the questions again, and throws back the curtain. Another woman leads me to a room with a bed shaped like a person in the middle of it. I am told to lie down and a blanket is thrown over me. The anesthesiologist slides a tube into my IV port and the doctor covers my left eye with a sheet and adjusts my face and clamps my eyelids open, which feels oddly pleasant, no doubt due to the drugs entering my veins. 

I try to focus on what’s happening but I’m already pretty stoned. It’s like watching an abstract film of pulsing colors and flowing shapes, the kind of thing they might project behind a band at a hippie party. The colors are vibrant and intense yet impossible to describe. One main shape seems to remain constant, though its boundaries are constantly shifting. It’s right in the center of my vision, and is kind of like a brick with two holes in it, one above the other. Is it an image of the tool she’s using to dig around in the back of my eyeball? I wish I could record what I’m seeing.

The procedure feels like it takes about two minutes, though it’s closer to twenty. I somehow get off the bed and into a wheelchair and am find myself back in the chair behind the curtain. A clear plastic shield is taped over my right eye. 

The perky assistant tells me everything went great, and  asks if I want any juice or water or coffee. When she retur s with my water, I realize with a shock that I can see her face clearly. It’s the first face I’ve seen with any clarity since March; young and pale, her hair pulled up into two little buns.

And then the assistant with the frizzy hair is back and has me hold onto her arm as she walks me out. “I think I’m fine to drive,” I say. No one laughs. 

During the ride home, I’m in a daze as the drugs leave my system and I try to get used to this weird way of seeing. Vision in my left eye is still blurry but in the other eye, everything in the distance is sharp. The color through the new lens is also different; cooler, with a slightly bluish cast. Things in the left eye look yellowed, like looking through a nicotine-stained window. Is this more accurate, or is it degraded due to the cataracts? I feel the anxiety begin to swell. What if I never see color the same again? How will this affect my art?

I hold my hand up and see two hands. I wave it and see three, four. I start to feel nauseous. I can feel my two views of the world trying to mesh, and the effort is giving me a headache. Traffic is heavy and the ride home feels endless. 

The minute I get home I collapse into a deep, long sleep. When I wake up, the apartment is exploding with sunlight. I put on my shades and stand out on the balcony and look out at the hills, seeing them clearly for the first time. The trees and houses are sharply delineated rather than a blur of color. It’s all too much. I lie down again and it is only with great reluctance that I eventually get up.

Robyn drives me to my postop appointment the following morning. I am able to read the bottom line of the eye chart. The assistant says my eyesight is 20/25, which seems remarkably apt with the new year right around the corner. She puts drops in my eyes and checks my eye pressure. The machine used to blow a puff of air at your eye but now it just shines a blue light. All this progress.

When the doctor comes in I tell her that it gives me headaches having to switch incessantly from eye to eye. She nods sympathetically and says they can punch out the right lens of my glasses. I tell her that probably won’t help with the headaches. She says probably not. I ask if an eye patch would help. She says it might. I ask if I should try using a pair of readers. She says sure. I ask about the color change and she says it’s normal. I see her for another checkup in January. The other eye isn’t getting done until the end of February.

Robyn drives me to the drugstore and buys me an eye patch, and that afternoon I buy a pair of readers from the grocery store. It seems like, between the two, the next few months may be tolerable, even if I do look like a nut job. I will make the best of this not-really-great situation. I will strive to be there and not care.

I spend the day careening like a madman down the street, unable to pick up objects properly, stopping to take out my glasses anytime I want to read anything or look at my phone. I watch the man with the blanket shuffle past the coffee shop and realize that compared to me he looks like he has his shit together. After all, he’s not doing anything but wearing a blanket, whereas I look like a twitchy. bedraggled supervillain. 

But then I look up at the buildings and the trees and the distant hills. I read the street signs and the bus numbers and see the expressions on people’s faces and it’s all clear, everything’s so sharp and clear, and I see my reflection in a shop window and that’s clear too and on top of it I see that I’m not wearing glasses for the first time since I was seven, since forty-five fucking years ago, and it’s such a shock, I don’t even recognize myself -of course the eye patch doesn’t help- and even though I still have a long way to go with all of this, even though I still have another eye to get worked on and my foot is still nowhere near healed up, and who knows how many horrible losses lie ahead, and even though the country is going to hell and the planet is burning, despite all this, when I get home I start to laugh, and then I start to wail like a mournful flugelhorn.

And it does feel good.