Cataracts Surgery
OK. If there’s one thing that surprised me the most about having Retinitis Pigmentosa, it’s how quickly cataracts formed in my eyes. RP patients are very prone to them. For those of you who are too young to have even bothered thinking about cataracts, it’s a condition in which the fluid in your eyes basically gunks up and clings to the back of your lens. This can result in halos around bright objects, muted colors, even worse night vision, problems reading, and difficulty seeing faraway things. There is no fix for this other than to swap out the lenses.
For those of you who are curious what cataracts looks like from a first person perspective, just look at Monet’s Water Lillies. He had cataracts when he painted them.
Nymphéas, temps gris, 1907
oil on canvas
When I went to get my cataracts removed, the doctor said I was one of his youngest patients at thirty-nine. It’s not a fun surgery (what surgery is?), because you have to be awake throughout in case something goes wrong. It is, however, easy and so run-of-the-mill that it’s nothing to fret about. Once I had both eyes done and recovered, the world was clearer, cars were shinier, colors were more saturated, and I could see every tree on the Hudson Valley mountains.
Reading, of course, is now much easier, but now I need reading glasses. The artificial lenses don’t shift focus as easily as my natural ones did. So, now instead of distance glasses, I need them to see things up close.
