Field Notes

Fair warning: neither this post or the video attached to it are for the faint of heart. You have been warned kids!

Just like all male members of the Gumucio family I was born with Cataracts (Gråstarr) in my both eyes. This has been fine for most of my life, since its in my case was very mild. The diagnosis i got as a child was that I would not have to get surgery until the age of 40.

And now, the moment is upon me! At the tender age of 35 i find myself seeing really really bad. The deterioration started about a year ago and my recent visit to the eye specialist confirmed it. I have about 50% vision on both eyes, and will be getting surgery sometime probably during the next month.

As a positive thinking person, i cannot help but notice several advantages to my current situation:

The people that you try to avoid, you never have to pretend you don’t see them when you meet them on the street, because you don’t see them. This happens to me all the time, and I’m pretty sure that some people in our apartment buildlng have me pegged as some kind of uptight snob that ignore them. This of course is a half-truth at best.

You make new friends. As you wave like an idiot to complete strangers, trying to avoid  situations like the one described above, you are bound to be waving at people that only have a distant similarity to your personal friends or acquaintances. This also happens to me all the time, three times in fact during just past weekend. You can also factor in that I have an exceptional memory for faces, and also frequently say hello to people I haven’t met since kindergarten. They don’t wave back.  Uptight snobs!

The excerpt above is from my long long list of drafts for this blog, I must have written it before my surgery, the text for which is in another draft as it were. Read on for the full story..

I had the good fortune to recieve the eye surgery in August of 2008. In two separate sessions I paid a visit to the company Medoculars office in Östermalm, Stockholm. The first time I was very nervous, but an elderly gentleman in the waiting room told me that I actually had nothing to worry about. I was offered and accepted a mild tranquilizer anyway.  The operation itself is considered a very minor one, since the lens of the eye doesn’t exactly reside in the eye, but in a sack hanging outside the actual eye lobe. No opening of the eye lobe is necessary, only a millimeter-wide hole in aforementioned sack.

The operation itself was quite remarkable. You lay down on the bed and they put a mask over your face, it covers your entire face and then they cut a hole in the mask over your eye, the nurse actually caught a piece of eyelid in her scissors, no harm was done but I freely admit it didn’t help my stress level one bit. The end result of all the setup was that I found myself staring into a bright yellow rectangle of light: The microscope of the surgeon.

In the next phase my old and blurry lens was smashed into a thousand pieces using ultrasound, the effect of this was quite stunning, as the rectangle of light suddenly became completely out of focus.  The surgeon opens a tiny aperture to the lens and sucks out the pieces, the new artificial lens – specially made just for me – is inserted with a syringe and unfolds on its own to fit my eye. All the surgeon has to do now is to make sure the lens is centered and that everything looks ok.  The whole procedure took 10 minutes, after which coffee and a bun was waiting for me in the next room. After recovering from the blinding light of the microscope, I was completely fine and ready for new adventures. Absolutely amazing how easy and completely pain-free the whole process was.

In a side note, when I returned to do the other eye, I realized in the waiting room that I had been sedating the wrong eye, and that the eye I was about to do surgery on was completely au naturelle. Accepting my fate (and another tranquilizer), I decided to rather bite the bullet and let them do the procedure anyway than wait, my theory being that there were almost no sense of pain in the actual eye, and relying solely on the anesthesia I received then and there. My theory was right, it was perfectly fine, but I did feel the surgeon opening my eye.

My status right now is that with progressive glasses, as my new lenses are unable to adjust focus, I see better than I have ever done in my entire life.