I’m going to be taking a little time away from most things involving binocular vision.
Not quite sure for how long yet. I may have mentioned that my vision is crap once or twice … well, not joking about that. And next week I’m having the first of two eye surgeries that will hopefully fix it. Called a partial cornea transplant, it’s the replacement of the endothelial layer of a cornea. I won’t gross you out with the details of the procedure, but it sounds pretty nasty and I’m not excited about it. I am, however, excited about getting my vision back to … well, better than it has been since about 4th grade.
I have an eye condition called Fuchs’ Dystrophy (pronounced FOOKS, as in “I don’t give a fook, I can’t see print that tiny,” or “I’m so tired of my vision being all fooked up”), and it’s basically edema of the corneas. The retinal fluid is supposed to circulate through the layers of cornea, and back into the retina, but with Fuchs, the pumps that send the fluid back stop working, and the corneas fill up with fluid and it hurts. And it makes everything look blurry. And after a few years there’s crud and gunk and blechy stuff built up between the layers, and everything starts to look hazy and indistinct. Forget reading without direct light – and forget anything less than black print on white paper.
I haven’t seen a movie since about 2012. My eyes are so sensitive to LED screens that I have to severely limit my computer time. The sun is much too bright, and don’t even talk to me about those lethally bright headlights that slash across your vision like tiny knives. I want to find the asshole who thought that was a good idea and throttle him, because you know it was a man, to within an inch of his damn life.
But that’s not why you called.
I’m going to be taking some time off because the recovery time for this thing is not short, and I’m not 100% sure how long yet, but I won’t be doing much writing. Or reading. Or driving. For a while. Fortunately, I have a couple of new toys to play with to keep me occupied – once the first week of recovery is over.
The first week. Yes. My adorable, funny, brilliant, excitable, passionate-about-corneas surgeon is going to put a gas bubble between my cornea and my eyeball, and I have to spend an INORDINANT amount of time laying on my back with my nose pointed straight at the ceiling to keep that gas bubble right over the center of my eye so the new inner cornea will laminate to the old outer cornea. There are no sutures, so the gas bubble is pretty much it. And I have been sternly cautioned about delamination (“delamination bad!”) so we won’t be doing that. I will be as have as I can be. I have friends coming to keep me from killing people. My best boy (and fave musical co-creator) Ryan will be here all the way from New York City for the weekend to keep me occupied while Michael runs off to meet his daughter’s new squeeze . . .
But I ain’t gonna be doin’ no writin’ or readin’ for a while. I have never made it through a pod cast in my life, so I’ll be trying that. Looking for some audio books, but not really finding anything that makes my heart go pitter pat. If you wanna come over and read to me from some awesomely exciting books on the science of consciousness, holler. Seriously. Help me.
Alright, Alma, stop whining. What the holy Fook does this have to do with the Hanged Man?
Okay. Getting to the point now.
So I’ve had a few little … bullshit things happen recently, including standing up from peeing and hearing something in my foot go SNAP and feeling OUCH and barely being able to put any weight on my foot at all … so I have canceled all my appointments this week … and feel very frustrated and angry about it. But I journeyed to talk to my friend and teacher Taliesin, who said, “This is kind of like a Hanged Man moment. You are willingly undergoing a challenge in order to gain vision.” Oh shit, another initiation, I should have guessed … So … I’m looking at this week as preparation time.
I’m really not ready, to be honest. I have a lot of things I need to do, self-care things. Me-time things. Comfort prep. All the things. And I’ve decided to take a real break from everything including these posts, instead of writing a bunch of new stuff or depending on re-runs. Ease and peace and softness, to get ready for the challenge of being very patient and very still, neither of which are my strong suits.
So wish me luck. And I’ll see you, halfway better than I can see you now, in a few weeks. Aaaaaannnnnnd then we’ll do it all again in November.