What You See is What You Get

Today I watched my wife’s eye get sucked out of her head.















Well, not the entire eye, just the lens, but it was still really cool. She went in for cataract surgery this morning. They called me back into a room to talk about the post-

op care, and there was a large TV screen with her eyeball on it. That’s all it was, her eyeball, opened wide. The surgery was being broadcast live. There was a small implement that looked like the tip of a calligraphy pen poking into the bottom center of her eye, where there was a 3mm incision in the cornea. “…and after she wakes up, which will probably be around 2:30pm, she can take the bandage off if when she can blink,” the nurse explained as I stared at the screen. It was hypnotic. This big eyeball staring at me. Kind of like watching Lord of the Rings. “Do they take the whole lens out?” I asked, although they were quite obviously doing just that. I didn’t need to ask. I could see it right there in front of me. After all, I wasn’t the one going in for surgery. But I was fascinated watching it. The nurse explained that a cataract is a medical condition where the entire lens becomes dense and cloudy, not just a film covering the surface. The procedure is really a lens extraction, and they put in a new lens, custom made for her eye. The calligraphy pen broke up the lens, and when it finished, a small vacuum took its place. Small in real life, that is. On screen it was the size of a Dirt Devil. It sucked out all the lens pieces, and then another tool came onscreen to insert the new lens. The lens went in all folded up, and I watched as it slowly unfolded, like a flower blooming in slow motion, the bright orange backdrop of her retina helping to illustrate the thin black edges of the transparent lens like some jellyfish dancing in front of an underwater volcano. Now how cool is that? She’s back home and doing fine. She napped for a couple hours. I took a vacation day so I could be caregiver, and she’s remarkably self-sufficient when she isn’t sleeping, so this is more like a standard vacation day for me. Just without the beach. #