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It's hot outside, but not too humid even though it's somewhat cloudy. I've been laying on the second-floor deck on the chaise lounge and watching the wind sway the pine tops. It amazes me still that I can now see the pine needles on the trees a long way off, and that the blue of the sky and the green of the leaves is really blue and green.
My new plastic lenses are uncontaminated by the nicotine brown that stained my cataracts. If you have ever noticed the brown stains on people's fingers that smoke cigarettes, then you've seen the color I had to see the world through before the eye surgery.
At the time I didn't know any difference. The cataracts grew and got stained with brown slowly and incrementally. I didn't actually know it was there until it was gone. I knew it was gone immediately after my right eye was operated on. Maybe not immediately after the surgery, but the next day after they took the plastic cover and bandages off the next morning. That is when I knew I had been seeing a brown-tinted world. I had a clear lens in my right eye and a brown one in my left eye.
Three weeks later the ophthalmologists removed the cataract in my left eye and replaced it with an intraocular lens like they had installed in my right eye. Except that this time, the world wasn't so clear when they took the patch off the next day after the surgery. They operated early one Friday morning. Then, took the patch off the next morning, and the world was grayed out in my left eye. It took two days before I began to think the surgery might work out right.
Now, it's a couple of weeks later. As far as the seeing part of it is concerned the completed surgical procedure on both eyes has worked well. Like I mentioned above, I can see individual pine needles at the top of the pine trees a hundred yards (91.4 M) away. I just don't know why anymore. Being possessed by really good vision without eyeglasses doesn't make sense like it once did.
It doesn't make sense in the sense of sensuality. Having pretty good vision didn't make my libido return in full force. Looking at fertile young women doesn't arouse me anymore than watching turtles sit unmoving on a log down by the pond. They're still there looking sexy to potent young men, but all I see is where that's gonna lead to... babies... and hard times ahead. Fools! We're all fools...
People were telling me that my eyeballs looked swollen right after the procedures were done, and as time passed they commented on how they seemed not as big. Not as swollen. But, nobody has yet told me my eyes look about normal again. They don't feel normal. There is a new normal that is not normal to me yet.
There is a circle of physical sensitivity around each of my eyeballs maybe a half inch wide. The feeling follows around the edge of the socket holes in my skull. It's no hinderance. It doesn't appear to interfere with my seeing stuff. It doesn't hurt or make me happy either. It's just there, and it worries me a little that I don't know what's going on.
I may have options at this juncture about whether to reconnect objects that made sense with my old way of seeing to my new way of seeing. It's becoming more apparent that my recall is not as sharp as it used to be. It's very reassuring to have a web connection and a search engine to remember content I used to depend on in order to make a living.
Why would I wanna remember the details and formulas of how to fit steam pipe when I haven't done it for nearly twenty-five years, and not very likely to ever do it again. What I can do, however, is to remember little parts of it and use that in a search engine to find the whole thing. Once it's sitting there in front of me I can remember what the formulas are for.
Yet, it's a little like being able to see well again. What I abandoned as not useful in the past doesn't become useful again just because it's clearly available for the old reasons. I still don't fit or weld pipe anymore, even if I might do it better than ever because I can see how once again.
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