I just got home from a hockey game. It wasn’t unusual in any way, except that compared to the past few months it was different in every way.
In October, I started to experience some vision problems. It wasn’t long after I had had my annual opthalmology and optometry appointments and I thought that maybe the place I ordered my contact lenses from had screwed up my order. At first it just felt like my contacts didn’t fit quite right. If I would blink, my vision would be sharp, but then it would gradually degrade. Blink again. It would clear up. Rinse and repeat.
Going into the holidays, I got busy and did my best to wave it off as allergies or dry eyes or something else ordinary. Yes, I realize this was completely irrational.
But by January my vision had noticeably degraded. I was playing in a hockey game, standing at the blue line in my own zone and I couldn’t find the puck. Now my vision has never been that great. I was born three months early. As a result, I’m severely nearsighted, I have scarring on my retina in my left eye, I was born with cataracts in each eye and I’m so right-eye dominant I effectively have no depth perception. When those stereogram prints were all the rage in the early 90’s, I used to stare at them for hours to no avail.
So I often had a hard time finding the puck in a hockey game. But I had learned a lot of visual cues along the way to help me find it when I lost it. For example, look where everyone else is looking. Most people I played with had no idea I had vision problems. But something was strikingly different about this experience. This time, I knew where the puck was. I could tell by the actions of everyone around it. But I couldn’t clearly see it. Instead I saw a blurry black dot. I blinked thinking I had sweat in my eyes. But this time it didn’t get sharp.
Then I started noticing it in every day life. Stopped at a red light (on my bicycle - don’t worry I’m not a cyclops driver), I couldn’t read the street sign across the intersection. The weird thing was, it wasn’t that the letters were too small. This I was well accustomed to and wouldn’t be any cause for concern. It was that they were blurry. Now I’m used to blurry - when my contacts were out. But this was the first time I had experienced blurry with my contacts in.
I’m an amateur photography and photography terminology provides the perfect language for this situation. Being so nearsighted that my vision couldn’t be entirely corrected even with contact lenses meant I was used to things looking so far away that I couldn’t read them. But the world was in focus, sharp if you will. Letters being blurry was a new thing and a bit scary. This was the trigger that pushed me over the edge to go back to the eye doctor.
I went to my optometrist thinking it was a problem with my contacts. Because my vision is so severe, she had to order lenses for me. They didn’t exactly have trial lenses on hand in my prescription. So I had to return in three weeks. A few weeks later I came back and the lenses she ordered didn’t help. So I had to come back a few weeks later and try more lenses. And then those didn’t work. And then the next ones didn’t work.
Now I’ve been going to the optometrist since I was 2 years old and I hate it. It doesn’t seem scientific at all. I’m supposed to tell you which is better: 1 or 2. Are you kidding me? They are both blurry and frankly isn’t there a better way to do this. So going back to the optometrist every three weeks was not my idea of a good time. Not to mention that while my optometrist was very patient and persevered, she didn’t do a great job explaining why she was having a hard time finding the right lens.
Now I can be a bit of a hypochondriac like the best of us, and after several trips to the optometrist and meanwhile my vision was getting noticeably worse week after week, my imagination kicked in. Maybe it’s not a contact lens problem. Maybe my retinas are deteriorating. After all, that’s a risk for people who are born early and I had retina problems as a kid. Or maybe worse, maybe I was going blind. Or worse yet, did I have a brain tumor? You can see how this would be nerve wracking.
At some point my optometrist mentioned that she was having a hard time nailing down my astigmatism correction. Oh what a relief. That sounds perfectly normal. Oh wait, but then she continued. She explained that every time I came in, she got a very different reading. Hmm, I thought, is this more odd-ball optometry science. But that’s when she recommended I see a cataract specialist. She explained I might need surgery.
Okay, eye surgery sounds scary. Frighteningly so. I mean we aren’t talking lasik. For cataract surgey, a human being, cuts your eye ball. There’s plenty of room for human error. Oh and I forgot an important part. It was my right eye - the better eye, the severely dominant eye - that was having the problem. It was getting so bad that I was closing my right eye to see better. That might not mean much to those of you with two good eyes, but my left eye vision is about 20/100 - for those of you with 20/20 vision that means something that looks 20 feet away to you, looks 100 feet away to me. And at this point that was my better eye!
So while eye surgery scared the living daylights out of me, this was great news. This sounded like a solvable problem and it had to be better then coming back to the optometrist every week, where each time I would get my hopes up all over again that this time we’d get it right, only to go home still trying to read the blurry signs.
So I said sign me up. Point me in the direction of the cataract specialist. This was in April. I saw the cataract specialist a few weeks later (everything happens in few weeks increments when you are scheduling doctor appointments) and she said I may benefit from cataract surgery. May? What the hell does that mean?
Okay, so they can’t guarantee anything. Eyes are complicated. My eyes are especially complicated. My symptoms sounded like symptoms that would be caused by a cataract, but there could always be something else. So sure we’ll go ahead and cut your eye open, but no guarantees. Um … okay. I think. Thanks for inspiring confidence.
By the way, in case I hadn’t mentioned it before, I’m not 80. I’m 31. Most people who have cataract surgery are 80. This apparently is the kind of thing that every nurse I encountered felt the need to point out. From the scheduling nurse who set up my appointments, to the nurse who gave me my pre-op instructions to the nurse who admitted me. Right, so feeling very assured that I was a freak of nature, i went ahead and decided to do the surgery.
So talk about an emotional rollercoaster. Part of me couldn’t wait to have the surgery. I hated feeling helpless and while I’ve never had good vision, I was always able to get by without most people noticing. But the other part of me was scared to death. They were going to cut open my good eye!
Fortunately, the surgery came and went and it was a piece of cake. They decided to do the surgery under general anesthesia because I have a lot of uncontrolled eye movement. This basically means i checked in, got some eye drops, an IV, met the anesthesiologist and then got to take a nap. I woke up and had one of the most amazing experiences of my life. This is going to sound trivial, but for me, it was just the beginning of a life changing event. I woke up in the recovery room, and while I was ridiculously groggy from the anesthesia, but even in this state, the very first thing I noticed was I could read the clock across the room. The numbers were sharp. There were no halos. I laughed out loud. I was so relieved. The surgery worked.
Reading a clock may not mean much to you. You probably do it every day. But it was a very big deal to me. On the ride home, I read every license plate and street sign. I giggled. I was elated. The world seemed zoomed in and sharp as a tack. I felt like a kid who had just learned how to read. I was in awe of every street sign I passed.
That was about 5 weeks ago. Before the surgery, while my vision had been deteriorating, so were my hockey skills. Playing hockey with limited vision was disorienting. I became timid. Normally, there is nothing timid about me. I stopped trying. I started to look down, because from my head to the ice was within my depth of focus, but across the ice to a teammate wasn’t. I stopped passing. I would often look lost and confused on the ice - it turns out I was both.
Two weeks after my surgery, I played in my first hockey game. I was like a kid at Christmas. It was the first time in 11 months in which I could see clearly. I loved it. But having not tried for months, I was woefully out of shape and wasn’t very comfortable on the ice. Tonight, after a few games under my belt with good vision, it all came back. I skated hard. I won battles along the boards. I scored a goal. More importantly I set up a teammate’s goal. I knew who was who. I knocked a puck out of the air (a good feat given that the surgery didn’t help my lack of depth perception). But most importantly, I had a ton of fun. I remembered why I play this game. It brings the best out in me. It makes me want to compete. It makes me want to make those around me better players. It makes me be someone I want to be. It’s cheesy, I know, but every word of it is true.
I read that cataract surgery is one of the most common surgeries performed in the United States. I will say, there is nothing common about the results. It has completely changed my life. I’m sure they will never read this, but I want to thank my optometrist for not giving up, my surgeon for being good at her job, and my surgeon’s nurse for reassuring me that there was nothing scary about it at all and everyone else who played some part in making me see clearly again. Most people who have this surgery are late in their life, but I have most of my life ahead of me and the future is much clearer than it has ever been (pun fully intended). I still appreciate it every single day.