I began to wear glasses about the age of 3 so I have been wearing them a long time. My right eye has always been the good one, 20/20 vision or better. The left eye is not properly shaped and would not have been a good candidate for correction by surgery. Because of the poor shape, the vision from it was sufficiently inferior to make my brain diminish my consciousness of images from the left eye. I was once told by an ophthalmologic nurse to respect that eye, nevertheless. She said it did more for my awareness than I thought.
Over the last few years, the medical problems I developed were all noticed by physicians or instruments before I knew about them. The doctors said my blood sugar was edging toward diabetes, my prostate was cancerous, and my eyes were developing cataracts. I asked Lynn if she thought it might help if I stopped further contact with doctors but she discouraged that approach.
I eat little sugar, candy, white flour, white rice and white potatoes. I avoid beer and my former mainstay, pretzels. The prostate was removed. It turned out that the least problem was the cataracts. In December 2007, I had cataract surgery. They told me the doctor would insert a new lens which would unfold itself inside the eye. He did exactly that. A week later, I had the other eye done.
I now have 20/20 vision in both eyes, something new for me. However, those deadly words “as we age” that the doctor utters before announcing some new problem apply to focusing, too. He told me that if a child has to have a lens removed from an eye, it is totally gelatinous while the lens from a senior citizen is a solid object. So, refocusing on something near is much harder “as we age”. I have purchased more than half a dozen pairs of reading glasses for use with the computer. I had to if I was to avoid headaches from tilting my head back to use the trifocal on the monitor screen.
Early researchers found that a lens inverts its image but they knew that they didn’t see things upside down. It was a struggle to tease out the fact that our brains early on invert the image so that what we see corresponds to the world. My brain became aligned to concentrating on the right eye and won’t pay much attention to the left one. It also became habituated to the feeling of glasses on my face and it tells me that my vision is inferior if it can’t detect any spectacles.
We are still unable to duplicate nature in this and many areas. The new lenses are subject to glare and reflections in a way that my natural ones never were. But I am grateful for the vision I have and the care and inventiveness that helps me enjoy this world.
