During the last of her 88 years, my mother had difficulty seeing and hearing. It is true that we have other senses but those two are the big ones. She could see a little, enough to push her walker through seated people without running over their feet. But she had little ability to read or watch tv. She could hear if I spoke more or less right into her ear, even without her hearing aids.
Now, I have hearing aids. The ones I am wearing are “open fit”, with a tiny clear line that goes into the ear canal from the back of the ear where the electronic part lies. I have an older set but the open-fit ones are considerably better and were a little less expensive. Still, I miss much of what Lynn says. I’m guessing that more than 70% of the time, I need to ask her what she said to me. It can be tiresome for both of us to have so much missed and so many requests for repetition. If you say something you care about, it is trying to say the same thing again with the same feeling at a greater volume. Doing so takes effort and uses energy.
A year or so ago, I had cataract surgery. I did have cataracts but a main reason for the surgery was that pressure inside the eyeball tends to be lower afterwards. I had been having high pressure in the eyeball for quite a while, a situation related to glaucoma. Ever since I was three years old, I have had basically one good eye. The left one was a bit out of line for binocular vision and it was a bit misshapen. When I had the cataract surgery, I was impressed at how quickly it went and how the procedure gave me new eyes. I now actually have 20-20 vision in the left eye. That is good but the misalignment between the eyes is still there and my brain is still trained to treat signals from the left eye as peripheral.
Surgery gave me new lenses in my eyes but it cannot give me young eyes. The lens of a child is a sort of jelly while the lens of an oldster is a solid object. That means that the oldster cannot change the focal length, resulting in the well-known effect of being unable to read small print. I keep a magnifying glass in each car and one near my computer and another where we open mail. There have been times when I had a good map in front of me but simply could not make out a highway number without a magnifying glass.
