What they don't tell you about cataract surgery

I had cataract surgery last Monday. Strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, it involved the same eye that my last post was about. My vision through that eye had deteriorated precipitously over the past few years, finally getting to the point where nothing I could see was in focus at any distance. The optometrist informed me that cataract surgery was the only option.

"Nothing to it," "it's a piece of cake," "it takes all of 15 minutes" is what any number of people told me. So I went in calm and stayed calm (BP only rising to 130/75 while I waited in the staging area, as a multitude of people came to put drops in my eyes, an IV in my hand, and sensor pads on my chest and abdomen), and pretty much sailed through the procedure. I even waved cheerio to the surgical team as I was wheeled out into the recovery area.

Then, through a window, I saw the sky. It was an overcast day and the sky should have been dark gray. It wasn't. It was an astonishing blue, a blue that the sky never is, even on a sunny day, as if someone had taken lilacs and put an aquamarine wash over them. I saw that sky and the next thing I knew I was crashing. Apparently my heartrate went to 38 and my BP to 60 over something. People came running and brought me around, pretty much by upending me. They gave me some cookies and some cranberry juice and someone cheerfully told me that one person faints every day. I guess on that day it was me. They do 12000 to 15000 such procedures a year, and the woman sitting next to me in the staging area gave her year of birth as 1932 ... but I was the one who fainted.

Afterwards, my sister drove me to the house of the friend with whom I was going to stay overnight, and the whole way the sky was lilac. In the morning, when I woke up, the sky was lilac. It took a little while for the colors to sort themselves out, but when they did, they were mind-blowing. The yolk of an egg -- mind-blowing. A firetruck-red coat -- mind-blowing. The cat's white fur -- actual white fur -- mind-blowing. It turns out I haven't been able to see the colour white for years now.

But it wasn't only the the colours. Everything from about three feet to far in the distance looks laser-etched. The sharpness and brightness of it all hurts my brain. I see everything in almost painful detail: my own reflection in the mirror (after years of seeing myself in soft focus), the specks and crumbs and watermarks in the kitchen that I thought was clean, the wrinkles and age spots I hadn't noticed on the faces of my friends. The brand name of the intra-ocular lens they put in my eyes is "Eyhance", and I had chosen it because it gives you clarity over an extended depth of field, but now I wish there were a brand called "Eycalm." As beautiful as the colours are, there is a certain comfort to be had in the vagueness aging lenses give you.