The room was overwhelmed with light: special-purpose lamps, blazing fluorescent ceiling lights, and all sorts of blinking equipment. The luminous haze masked the whole, while illuminating the particular. The drip-drip-drip of eye-drops seemed unending, The blurring effect of the eye-drops plus the dulling effect of an intravenous painkiller made it increasingly difficult to know what was going on.
I gave up trying and settled into the uncertainty.
I was in for laser eye surgery to remove cataracts in both eyes and replace them with artificial lenses made of quartz. Would these artificial lenses qualify me as a cyborg? Maybe, maybe not.
I thought more about seeing clearly than being a cyborg.
Monitoring machines around the room flashed intermittent signals like lighthouses in the fog. I was wheeled from one station to another, from one room to another. I don’t know how long this went on. I lost track of the time and how many eye-drops.
There was plenty of light, but all I could see from flat on my back was ceiling. Even so, I could hear. I could hear a background soundtrack of murmuring. the murmuring of maidens.
These voices were the shared conversations of unseen nurses, all of whom were ladies, ladies of all ages. Some of their talk was with other patients about ongoing procedure. Some was chit-chat about, dinner plans, vacations, kids, husbands, and weekend.
It was all too muffled to hear more than occasional words and fragments of sentences. There was an ethereal quality to it. It reminded me of the Sirens singing to Odysseus. Did the Sirens sound like this from faraway? It must have sounded a little bit the same.
At least in my imagination.
Then the doctor came in.
“Alright, let’s get Kraken”.
I reminded the Doctor of his puny line next day at post-op checkup. He was surprised that I remembered it. Me too. I didn’t remember much else.
I did remember the kaleidoscope of swirling colors made by the laser scraping off the cataract. The laser work was soon over. Then the whole thing was over. They pulled off whatever they’d attached to me, put me in a wheelchair, and wheeled me to the cub outside, where my designated driver was waiting to drive me home.
I’ve no idea how long it took from start to finish. One, two, three hours? Don’t know.
It was all a dreamlike sequence of flashing lights and the murmuring of maidens.
I’m going back in 30 day to get the other eye done.
I imagine getting the other eye done will be less of a mystery. The millions of other people who’ve had laser surgery to remove cataracts will probably not remember anything like what I‘ve described.
I might have exaggerated a little. Maybe more than a little. Yes, I waxed poetic to make the tale more interestingly than a dreary prose description of a commonplace operation.
Also, it wasn’t commonplace to me.
What I’ve written is an accurate recalling of my wandering thoughts that day.
Back home recovering after surgery - with a Heineken.
The clinic taped the flimsy sunglasses on my forehead.
They forgot to remove the wrist I.D. - so did I
One done, one to go.
Thanks to the staff of the Northern Ohio Eye Center, especially to Dr. Pajka, who brought back to me the light denied me by the cataract.I’m grateful for his good work, and for my memory
of the murmuring maidens.
Thanks too, to my friend, Rick Cicigoi, who volunteered
to drive me to and from the operation.
Rick also took the photo above.