I find it difficult to tell you of my angst these days. It’s just normal insomnia with side order of anxiety, I think… It’s boring. It’s whiny. It’s exhausting. But here goes: it’s my eyes. My eyes haven’t been right since my cataract surgery.
Isn’t it ironic that this year is 2020?
I have double-vision. I never had double-vision before my eye surgery. My eye surgeon said that there wasn’t any possibility that my double-vision was from the cataract surgery. He said I must have always been this way. Or maybe it was a problem with my left-eye dominance and the left-eye surgery would get rid of it. The second cataract surgery didn’t get rid of it. The new pair of glasses didn’t get rid of it. And now the second set of lenses, through which I have to turn my head thirty degrees to the left and tuck my chin down to see in the distance, still doesn’t resolve my double-vision.
Can a person actually get depressed because she can’t see right?
Maybe it’s the fact that I can now read double sets of words in addition to reading sideways or upside down. I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO LEARN TO READ DOUBLE WORDS!
Maybe it’s the fact that most people I talk to have two sets of eyes and it creeps me out sometimes.
I’ve been upset at my inability to adjust to these new glasses, but when I looked it up on the Internet, there are a number of professional journal articles about patients with double-vision after cataract surgery. One of them said that some patients, because they haven’t found their surgeons able to solve their problems, have become litigious.
I feel pretty fucking litigious right now.
My neck hurts from leaning in to see what I’m typing. My eyes hurt from trying so hard to stop seeing double all day. My doctors are making me feel stupid and the receptionists are practically rolling their eyes when I come in. My regular eye doctor’s receptionist asks me for my name now, with a peculiar look on her face, as if I haven’t been a patient of theirs for the past ten years.
I HATE when doctors make me feel stupid. I’m not stupid. I hate when doctors minimize something that is bothering me. If it’s bothering me enough that I make yet another an appointment despite my busy life, it’s not minimum. If I can look it up on the Internet and see plenty of evidence that my complaint is a one percent side-effect of the surgery, then my doctor had damned well better not tell me it never happens.
And yes, it could be that I have insomnia anyway with a side serving of anxiety and it’s making me crabbier when I’m trying to work and live despite this awful problem with my vision. But it is just possible that seeing a bunch of people with two sets of eyes like some kind of mass metamorphosis happened while I tried to sleep or the Wuhan virus enjoined with Zika and offered a side serving of mutation, and it’s just getting me down.
Pretty far down.
And I can’t see the bottom.
Thank you for listening, jules