Self-portrait after cataract surgery #1.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Maintaining a sense of humor in an operating theater, while more or less awake I must add, is not easy. We'd had a 5 a.m. wake-up on the morning of my first cataract surgery, and a humorous perspective, shall we say, was not top of mind. We got there, I paid the hefty co-pay, we relaxed in the waiting room, my husband fell back to sleep under his baseball hat. And then, finally, I was called into the staging area for all the preliminaries—more drops in the eyes, blood pressure, etc. etc. The woman next to me said, "I've heard this surgery is a breeze."
"Well, it depends what you mean by "breeze," I mumbled. I was not feeling particularly breezy. I was tense. I was hungry. I was exhausted. Maybe it was because I had been fasting and was ravenous, or because I'd had little sleep, but it took a while for my observing writer's brain to kick in and note, with satisfaction and curiosity, the diversity of all the attending nurses and techs, particularly their eyewear. One very tall tech was flirting with the anesthesiologist who had just checked my height and weight for what he called "twilight" anesthesia. He was handsome, true, but she was embarrassing herself, and me, with the twists and turns of her lanky body. And her eyewear: thick black funky frames. Have you noticed that both men and women are wearing thick funky color-coordinated frames these days? I interrupted her flirtation with, "I like your frames." She turned, laughed, and thanked me. I was suddenly in focus again, not as a patient, but as a person
Then I started feeling cold and asked for a blanket. I had been instructed to wear a loose-fitting blouse. I don't wear blouses so I borrowed one of my husband's interesting shirts. I liked it, it cheered me, but the surgical staging area was arctic. I asked for a blanket. No problem, it was on me in minutes. I think it was made of disposable papier mâché. It felt like candy floss, more air and light than substance.
Finally it was my turn to be walked into the operating theater and settled onto a slab-like gurney. An array of men dressed in blue scrubs were standing at attention to one side—instrument reps, I think, supervising the installation of an update of the laser? An update!! So bright were those circular lights that I felt as though I was entering a space ship. I let my mind drift as my surgeon told me I was doing great, really great, and there were only a few seconds left of floating in outer space.
When it was over the doc asked how I was feeling. "It was like childbirth, " I said to her.
"Childbirth?" she asked, perplexed.
I was too drowsy to explain what I meant. And I am not exactly sure what I meant except to say: all the pre-op instructions did not prepare me sufficiently for the actual event. The actual event was much more interesting.