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It's beginning to feel like I am reaching the end of my rope. Yesterday, while driving home from eating breakfast I got a ticket for not wearing my seat belt. The cop looked at my driver's license and saw that I was supposed to be wearing glasses (which I can no longer see through because of the cataract surgery), and charged me with endangerment.
I may have talked him out of that by offering to show him my VA appointments sheet. Even without that additional charge this is gonna cost me cold hard cash I can ill afford. What a drag, man. I live two miles from the grocery store, and the rheumatologists are telling me I'll soon need artificial knees soon enow, so even walking that far to get something to eat is gonna be tough.
Perhaps I can develop some sort of sanguine attitude that will serve to get me through to the end of the trail. I doubt it though. I can get pretty whiny. I don't have but one or two visitors outside my family (who rarely visits, if at all) who stop by, and only two days ago one of them complained about the repetitious, redundant topics I hack to death with my boring outlook. I couldn't help it. I had to ask why he even bothered with such a buffoon.
Getting that ticket is gonna set me up for a vigilance I don't like to have to observe. The cop told me I have a couple of options. Go back and re-take the visual test at the DMV and get the restriction removed from my drivers license or wear eyeglasses I don't need if I drive. I see a lot better with the cataracts replaced, but not so good as to try to pass a visual test at the driver's license office that will cost me another $20-30 to be re-tested.
On the 7th of next month I'm scheduled for my final post-op appointment. They say they will check my eyes to see if they've healed from the surgery correctly, and then they'll test my eye sight for a new prescription if I need it. However this next appointment goes will probably be our last encounter in regard to the cataract surgery.
I don't know this for sure, but I'm impressed with the notion that the clear plastic, intraocular lenses the surgeons installed means that whatever prescription I receive from this appointment might be the last one I ever need. The flexible plastic lenses don't change much, and so the prescription I need to maximize my vision will probably stay the sa-me until I croak of becoming altogether too ancient.
With my point that whatever I got to go to the DMV office with after that last appointment will decide whether I get the visual restriction removed from my current driver's license. I want it off the record so that I don't have to think about whether I have a pair of glasses I don't need every time I drive my car. I'd like that to happen, but other facts may come into play that prevents it from transpiring. I.E., what if it fails?
The ambient temperature this morning at 9 o'clock is 70° (21.11° C) with fairly low humidity. It's very comfortable for a change. It hasn't been even been getting this cool at night. I'm sitting here practically nakid with no fans or air/conditioners making a bunch of noise. The cloudless sky is bluer than I have been able to see it for decades
The high pressure system means the noise from the paved road and the Wal-Mart maintenance room about two miles away, is going straight up in the air instead of being held to the Earth like it does with low pressure systems. Sometimes it's a reach for me to imagine air as a physical object that can constrain sounds to a corresponding altitude.
When I kept my last appointment with the new doctor that replaced the woman doctor from Vietnam at the VA Hospital. It turns out that this guy is from the mideast originally, and appears to have a different attitude toward medicine than she did. That's hard to say after just one short visit. The nurse was changed too. Everybody is new to me, and vice-versa. The nurse was very pleasant. She's new. That'll change.
As she looked over my medical records she saw that it's been a while since I've been vaccinated for pneumonia. She encouraged me to get it while I was there, and it would protect me from getting pneumonia for another five years. I have some reservations about not being able to develop pneumonia. That's what finally killed my father, and pneumonia was then called "the old folk's friend".
I don't know what will finally kill me. I'm hoping to die while under anesthesia during some dumb-ass attempt to save me from death. I can see it now. They put me on a gurney and place the intravenous needle into the top of my hand, and then (without me knowing when) they insert some nice drug to relax me, and render me unconscious for the purpose of the surgery, and I never ever wake up.
It'll never happen. It's just not my sort of luck. I probably won't be out of my mind with pain. That would be too easy. Death for me will probably not be short and sweet, but lengthy and unending. Days, perhaps months of sheer agony, and to top it off, I won't even get pneumonia so that it will finally end my torture.
Of course I told the nurse to go ahead and give me the shot. That was weeks ago. It still hurts. There is still a small, knotty lump there where she skillfully injected the serum into my body. I've been coughing up a clear phlegm rather constantly since then. I'm assuming it's my body's way of reacting like I had the actual disease, but don't.
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