Clarity Will Take Some Getting Used To

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To begin at the beginning, I don’t remember life without glasses. Well, that’s not really true.  I wasn’t one of those babies you see in the newborn nurseries with glasses taped to their tiny little heads. I must have started school without glasses, because I remember sitting in the back of class and peering through my fist so I could read what was written up front on the blackboard.  I’m not exactly sure how that worked but it did. You turn your fist into a little telescope, peer through it and you can see the blackboard better. No doubt some deep principle of optics at work there.  

My teachers probably reported my strange behavior to my parents, and I’m guessing it was around then that I got my first pair of glasses. Hence for pretty much all my life I have “visually challenged,” very, very nearsighted.  I wore glasses until my sophomore year in high school. The musical that year was West Side Story and I was cast as one of The Jets - the Anglo gang. It was 1965 or 66, and so while the idea of dancing gangbangers seemed tolerable, Action singing "Gee, Officer Krupke" while wearing glasses the thickness of Coke bottles just wouldn’t wash. So, one rehearsal I went on without my glasses and casually danced off the stage and into the orchestra pit. My pride, a major aspect of any high school identity, was the only casualty - and I got contacts!

Now, contacts in the late 1960s were very different than today’s high tech versions.  But they were well-suited for the lifestyle of my next few years. Hard little disks of plastic they were well nigh indestructible.  No solution really needed. At night you could just stick them on any surface - the nightstand, between the pages of a book, or in the spirit of full disclosure, down the sides of a pack of cigarettes.  Come morning you just popped them in your mouth, sloshed them around a bit and transferred them directly back into your eyes. No big deal. I know, I know, sounds totally disgusting nowadays, but those were simpler times. Like the rest of the world I eventually moved into soft lenses with toric astigmatism correction that required a second mortgage to buy the necessary cases, fluids, etc. 

About 15 years ago a normal check-up at the eye doctor detected a cataract in my right eye, so I had that fixed.  Leaving my really, really near-sighted left eye untouched.  I had actually become rather attached to the visual anomaly in that eye. Those of you out there who are near-sighted may understand what I mean. An uncorrected near-sighted eye is also a pseudo-microscope.  I could take out my left lens and see tiny things in incredible detail. Great for removing splinters and - much more importantly - drawing tiny little details. And so I have lived in that visually-unbalanced world ever since.

Fast forward to, oh, maybe 6 months ago.  My microscopic left eye began to acquire a plastic wrap like persona.  I would pop the lens out several times a day, run it through its multiple solutions, and put it back in.  It would, seemingly, be better for awhile, and then not.  It eventually dawned on me that the problem might lie elsewhere. I went to see MyEyeDoctor.  

“Whoa,” she opined. “You are really nearsighted!”

“Yes, I am.” I replied proudly.

“And I can’t believe you can see at all though this cataract.”

“Beg pardon?”

That conversation led me to another round of cataract surgery about a week ago. And the world truly is different.  I can now read my powerpoint slides in class without having to stand directly in front of the screen. I can tell immediately that I did not leave my keys, phone, iPad, etc., in that empty space where I thought I had left them. My doc tells me that I now have 20/20 vision in that eye.  However, unlike the folks touting lasik in commercials I do not walk around muttering “I can’t believe I didn’t do this years ago.” More often I find myself thinking “This is strange.”

Take waking up for example. For most of my life I would ease my way into consciousness. The world first presented itself through a gentle haze. Back in 1967 the film Elvira Madigan made its debut.  It was largely forgettable except for the incredible visual quality - ethereal, yet lush, quite beautiful.  It was rumored to have been shot with a silk stocking stretched over the camera lens.  The point is that that is how I used to see the world in the morning.  Then, when I decided it was time to fully engage with the world, I would put in my lenses.  Now I open my eyes and "WHOA! WAKE UP, DUDE! HERE WE ARE! UP AND AT ‘EM!" The temptation to simply close my eyes and go back to sleep again is significant. 

And then, as I mentioned earlier, there is the drawing thing.  Those of you who bought my coloring book.  .  .  What, you haven’t? Well, I can wait. Just log in to Amazon and search for Schrag Color Me Chilled Out. There it is. Hit “Buy with One Click.” OK, back now? Good. As you can see there is a lot of detail in some of those images - even more if you were looking at the original drawings that are 17 x 14. Back in the  PL (pre-lasik) era, all I had to do was pop out my left lens an I could draw those tiny little lines. Now I have to scramble around for ultra-magnifying reading glasses. Not the same thing at all.

Mind you I don’t regret the surgery.  The dizziness and unsteadiness on my feet that I used to write off to just another little gift of getting older have either disappeared or been greatly reduced. Driving at night is no longer a nervous game of “dodge ‘em” in a snow storm. The TV has gained significant clarity. Typing is a lot easier. I can recognize friends, students and colleagues from a far greater distance.

So, yes, no regrets. But unremitting visual clarity is not always the unabashed “good thing” you might assume. I now wonder what we might learn if we could slip back in time and give the impressionist and expressionist artists modern eye exams.  We might discover that they were actually realists - painting to world exactly as they saw it.

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