Regaining Vision: What Was Lost, Now Found

I had a cataract operation this week. No big deal, right? People get cataracts, they get them removed, they get a lens put in. Life goes on. It happens thousands of times every day throughout the world. My cataract was a very large one and was growing rapidly in my right eye. No one knew what was causing this sudden growth; they only knew it needed to be gotten rid of.

I hesitated month after month. I had the money, the insurance covered a lot of the operation, it was not an issue like it is for so many folks in the world who end up going blind. I am a white (sort of) middle class college over educated woman who at this moment in time has a roof over her head and opportunities and time afforded to few. I am privileged.  So why the hesitation to do what everyone in my social class does without, um, blinking an eye? 

Back in the late 60's when I was a kid, I can remember the precise moment I lost my clear vision. I experienced a sharp pain on the right side of my head, looked up at the elementary school stage and wham, everything was a blur. I knew something awful had just happened to me but like so much about my gut wrenching childhood, I went into denial. For a year I pretended I could see perfectly well until a sharp math teacher who'd been watching me for months squinting at the chalkboard called my mother and demanded she get me glasses. My mother was perplexed. "Why hadn't you told me?" she kept asking. "Your sister has glasses. It's nothing to be afraid of."

From that point on my geekiness was a done deal. Unlike my older sister who looked beautiful even if she were wearing a gorilla mask, I looked like the person wearing the coke bottle glasses, the big nose and the mustache mask - I now had all three for real and I was heading into adolescence. Life was going to be horrendous, I assumed. And indeed it was.

But I adjusted, learned to live with and at times revel in my misery and make out of it something unique. I wrote stories, made paintings, created a newspaper and put on plays. I became an artist of sorts. And thus I survived. Until two years ago when a lot of stuff hit the fan and I found out that if I had the cataract removed, I would be able to see once again and most likely pretty well.

On Tuesday this past week everything changed. The cataract was removed quickly and relatively painlessly and I didn't die. Except in a sense I did. Yesterday my eyesight was measured, my brilliant eye surgeon Dr. World Famous Maloney looked at me, said , "You have 20-20 vision. You look great." Huh? And then it occurred to me that maybe I should be paying attention to what he had just said. I looked up from where I was sitting, glanced around the room, stopped squinting, and everything was the sharpest and clearest it had been in 40 something years. No, it was actually sharper and clearer than the world has ever looked. Ever.

Wow.  Now I was looking at everything very closely. The tweedy colors in the jacket I was wearing. The streetlight at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood. The elderly woman crossing the street with her blue white hair and her soft brown leather jacket. The individual emerald green leaves of the tree at the corner of the street I turned down. My bright red Prius. The day old beard of the parking lot attendant with his harried and worried eyes motioning me to back out ever so slowly. All was a sudden LSD high of mind-shattering explosive color and light spontaneously spackled across a landscape that was only two days before a dull, grey, blurred image.

I could see.

And what that meant to someone whose filter has been muted, blurred and stifled for decades is life changing on some psychic level I can not yet comprehend. Everything that was old is new again. 

Maybe this is religion after all. Maybe this is god.