Well, you know, I did not want to be an obnoxious patient but by the time I got to his office, I was concerned. The problem was not going away.
“I have the color thingy,” I said to my doctor. “I looked it up on Wikipedia. You didn’t tell me it might happen and …”
My eye doctor laughed and put down the eye drops he was about it use. It’s been a week since cataract surgery on my right eye and this was checkup number two. All is fine actually.
But I did hear an echo: “You call those socks matched?” I remember countless wives and girlfriends yelling that at me. Uh, not countless wives, I have only been married twice. And the first one did not yell much until she found out about one of the girlfriends.
I’m not digressing here. I have had a hell of a time matching up my socks. Black, dark gray, navy blue, navy gray — my God, I don’t know how I bought them all and I certainly cannot match them now.
“So,” and my doctor really began with this, “remember when you were in your twenties and you could match your socks?”
“Kinda,” I replied. We’re talking decades here.
“You began to lose your blue vision by age 30,” he continued. “It was all very gradual. You never noticed, you couldn’t notice, but year by year your world became less blue and more yellow. And now, with this surgery, in one day you’re seeing the world as it is for the first time in decades. The world is bluish.”
And it is. It’s amazing. My left eye, yet to be operated on, does see the world with the yellow lens that cataracts impose. But I’m right-eyed, so my color perception is driven by what I see coming in now: new, bright, and blue.
I’m back to normal now. Adjust to this new blue normal. It’s the reason I’ve been negligent in blogging. And in taking photographs and in using Photoshop. I wonder how that’s going to go?
I’m back to writing. If in these first few days my photos look a little too blue for you, please let me know. I know this really fabulous eye surgeon …
Oh, I was terrified going in. I hate eye drops. I could never wear contacts. The thought of watching some hand holding a scalpel and approaching my eye was keeping me up at night. “What if I jerk?” I kept asking myself.
Turns out not to be a problem at all. I was so drugged up, it could have been Dexter coming to finish me off with one of those butcher knife plunges through the heart. [Dexter is a TV character, a serial killer, who only does in bad people who have escaped the law; so while technically a criminal, most viewers tend to view him as a very personal vigilante. He works in Miami but most cities could use one.]
Time for a drink with Blue Curacao. Stunning.