the Walnut Diary

Today at my appointment with an eye surgeon I had a small tear on my right retina welded back into place with a laser. This sounds quick and neat. In practice it sounded and felt like any other heavy welding job: noisy, very bright, and repetitive. Whenever I groaned, the surgeon would let up for the eye cool down a bit. Regardless of what he said about the quickness of this procedure, it certainly takes some time from the eye-owner’s perspective. It’s hard to keep track of time when one’s whole being is a single point where an inferno of blazing, rasping green light rapidly builds up the heat and pressure inside the egg.

But it works. No follow up instructions, just a call back in a month. My sister’s detached retina last year likely started with a little tear like mine. The difference was the early diagnosis.

The floaters, which I likened to a handful of algae in my right eye? “You could have them drained out of the eyeball and they could come back, or you could go blind in that eye. Live with them.” Because this was the answer I expected from my reading on the subject, I was O.K. with that.

But I figured I deserved a freebee for the pain of the operation, so I asked, “Why is it that the more drops in my eye that I receive in an optical procedure such as this, the less I notice the floaters? Is there something I can take to duplicate this effect?”

“Dilation of the pupil diminishes the relative size of each obstruction, so your vision is a bit clearer. But your vision is also blurred, so continued use of drops would provide no benefit.”

By the time I was clear of the office, the pain was gone. On the way home I asked my chauffeur to detour to a tractor supply place to pick up parts. After an hour’s drive I was ready to do some work on an ailing tractor, and then drove it around the property to chase a pair of marauding bucks away from my apple trees, then drove around, spraying the trees with deer repellent.

In for a nap.

By any rational measurement, our day at Hotel Dieu went very well, and I am back tapping out another blog entry.