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I was fifty-eight and enjoying a walk at the plaza. Suddenly, my vision was distorted. I blamed it on my glasses and never not for a moment stopped to consider that such rapid onset distortion could hardly be the fault of glasses. As chance would have it, I passed a plaza optical center and decided to have a professional evaluate my problem. I was promptly led to the waiting room of the optician and eventually got in to see her. As she focused her bright light into my right eye she exclaimed and I say it word for word,"somethings sucking the back of your eye out!"

She turned on the lights and faced me with a startled look. There is something going on in your eye and a new prescription eyeglasses won't fix it. I am going to make you an appointment with a retinal specialist. The journey from that first specialist to an all day stay at the emergency room to a second retinal specialist is a line of painful memories that I am still not willing to deal with. I was diagnosed with macular hole and set up for an operation.
If one has never had their eye operated on for example something simple like a blood clot that could rupture one has never been through the experience of a rather new operation called the macular hole. I was given before surgery anesthesia that kept me awake but deadened the nerve impulses around the eyes and probably elsewhere.
The surgeon went into my eye and proceeded to suck out all the liquid that the eyeball is floating in. He inserted surgical instruments worthy of a Lilliputian in Gulliver's Travels and he sewed up the centers of my eye that was slit also called the macular hole. He deserves whatever accolades can be bestowed on a doctor for having nerves of steel and a non-flinching hand. He vacuumed my eye or that's I choose to call it and cleared up any blood that may have been the cause or may have resulted from his cutting. My eye was a bloody mess.
I laid head down in a special dental couch made especially for those recovering from macular hole surgery.
After such surgery, one is not allowed to look straight not even with the good eye. One is therefore, positioned face down for two to three weeks. And I mean face down even while sleeping.
I am now recovering from this surgery and the nitrous oxide gas bubble that was inserted following surgery has for all intents and purposes as far as I can see, disappeared. There is still some disturbance in my eye but my vision is not split in double screen.
Should I not have chosen such complicated, risky and traumatic recovery surgery, I was guaranteed blindness in my right eye. Was there a choice. No, and all I can say is that medical science has progressed to a level that is capable of sewing the back side the filmy camera like film that determines whether or not we see. How callously I took for granted my vision. How dramatic it now is to be able to see and to walk and to drive looking straight ahead.
Our health determines our willingness to exist. We can, of course, be given psychotropic medication to induce willingness to live even in dire circumstances, but to live without such chemically dependent substitutes for wanting to live we have to feel as if there is a reason to exist. My new eyesight has given me another reason to get up in the morning and a profound admiration for our health professionals most of all eye specialist.
If the eye is the window to the soul, then my surgeon has looked deep into my soul and sutured a visible rupture. I would like to recommend him for a role as Superman, the man of steel nerves.

Learn more about this author, Nora K Anthony.
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