"Basically, you have two options," explained Dr. Charles Richards, an opthalmologist at Piedmont Retina Specialists in Winston-Salem, after a brief exam of my wife's, Kim, right eye.
"We can do nothing for several months," he said, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "Or we can operate."
Operate? Wait. you mean, like eye surgery?
You could have scraped me up off the floor. I'm pretty squeamish about eye stuff. I don't even do eye drops very well.
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| Kim immediately after surgery. |
The surgery was for something called macular pucker, the child's primer description for those of us who are not opthalmologists. As Dr. Richards explained it, macular pucker is when the retina develops a wrinkle on the membrane, a result of the aging process. It can cause blurry or fuzzy vision in the eye. "There are no drugs or drops to treat it," said Dr. Richards. "Surgery is the only way."
I got up off the floor and raised my hand.
"Yes?"
"Is it laser surgery?" I asked, hoping to calm Kim's anxiety. And mine. She's squeamish about eye stuff, too. Laser surgery didn't sound too invasive. I mean, this is her eye we're talking about.
"No, it's mechanical," replied Dr. Richards and I immediately had thoughts of little hammers and chisels and scalpels at the ready as if we were still living in the Paleolithic Period of medicine.
"Oh, OK," I said, nodding my head like I knew what he was talking about. There might have been further conversation at that point, but I'm not sure. I really didn't hear anything after the words "eye surgery."
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| Kim 24 hours after eye surgery. |
"Let's go ahead," she said. "I just want to get this behind me. But don't tell anybody. I don't want the attention."
So of course, the first thing I did was tell everybody I knew. One of them was Larry Lyon, my former editor at The Dispatch who, in mid-life, became a Presbyterian minister. He's retired now, but his advice was sage. "Be calm for Kim," said Larry.
I have no idea how he knew by that point I was running wildly through the house screaming "Eye surgery! Eye surgery!" while waving my hands in the air. I was a mess. But I did settle down after that.
So we made the appointment. On Wednesday, we checked into Medical Park Hospital in Winston-Salem at 5:15 a.m., where the procedure would take place. By 7, we were called into the pre-op, where we met the attending nurses and the anesthesiologist. Then Dr. Richards came in with some soothing words.
We were set to go.
I had a book with me and I was prepared to knock off a chapter or two, but about 20 minutes later the waiting room monitor came up to me. "Kim's back and she's waiting for you."
Huh? Already? My colon surgery several years ago took more than three hours.
Dr. Richards came into the post-op cubicle and told us that everything went well. "She did great," he said.
Kim later told me that she never felt a thing, even though she was under a conscious local anesthesia that was delivered intravenously. She remembers having a bit of a coughing spell during the procedure and hearing Dr. Richards tell her, "Let me know when you're done coughing so we can continue."
Oh, my.
When I got into her cubicle, she was awake and, well, smiling. She was wearing a protective eye shield held on to her face with yards of medical adhesive tape. She looked like a pirate. Shortly thereafter, we were discharged.
We were home before lunch. What a morning. Kim promptly went to bed and slept for several hours. That gave me time to think about what had just happened:
My wife just had eye surgery, the first surgery she's had of any kind. She was at times nervous, scared and afraid. In spite of all this, it was her decision to proceed. She confronted her fears and conquered them full on. I thought she was incredibly brave.
She's my hero.
