A year of cataracts! I sounds like a sort of apocalyptic weather forecast.
If all goes well it will soon be over, but both metaphorically and actually I will see things with different eyes. I hope I will look back on this period as one of learning. The steady decline in my hearing which had been slowly narrowing my world has, in the last year, been joined by a rapid decline in vision and a much more dramatic reduction in the activities available to me. The first to go was bird-watching. I would catch a glimpse of an interesting looking shape in the sky but it would disappear as soon as I moved to focus on it. By the time my camera reached its first birthday I could no longer see the screen well enough to use it.
The next to go was driving. I had a last trip in the camper in September but I could not read the road signs so kept to roads I knew well.
The loss I felt most keenly was the printed page. Newspapers were the first casualties, but I managed to plough through a book in October before abandoning print. I could still read screens, so kept my brain active with the internet, ebooks and online news.
Then in November I began to record my "cataract blog". I will update it and sign off after the operations.
24 November 2013
It is now just over
a year since I had my eyes tested and got new distance glasses. The optician
did not diagnose cataract. It was not until February and my first trial trip in
the camper that I became aware of a mistiness while driving. I began to suspect
something else was wrong and did some internet research. Cataract seemed to fit
and Mark the doctor confirmed it on the 12th of April this year. "No need
to do anything now" he said."For most people it takes a long time to
become a problem, but in some it develops quite quickly."
I soldiered on, but
I was becoming more and more aware of a problem and came to the concusion that
I was one of the unlucky ones. In late May I saw the optician and began the
long process of getting treatment on the NHS. The first stage is an appointment
to see a specialist, and there is a 4 month waiting list for this.
While I was waiting,
I saw the ENT specialist who confirmed that there was nothing more they could
do for my deafness, but he did agree to write to the Opthalmology department to
confirm that I had severe hearing loss.
By September it was
obvious that I could not continue driving, and I was having increasing
difficulty reading normal size type. I could no longer watch birds, or take
photographs. Life was closing in.
I saw the specialist
on the 7th of October. The nurse who tested my sight was surprised how good it
was, but the specialist realised that because the cataract on my right eye
covered the centre of the eye, in bright light my vision was seriously impaired.
She fully understood about how much sight affects the ability of deaf people to
communicate and made a case for priority treatment.
I was now at day one
on a 6 month waiting list - unless I could get a cancellation or was given
priority.
A few weeks later I
went to have the eyes measured for their new plastic lenses. I had decided that
if I didn't get a better date than April, I would have to go private. I stressed to the technician that I was really
worried that if I could not lipread I would not be able to communicate, and if
I could not read then all forms of entertainment and information would be
closed to me. She made sure I was on tahe list of people who could be called at
short notice if they get any cancellations, and said she would ring admissions
and see what was happening.
Good news - I'm
scheduled for December!
Bad news - they are
running two months late.
That meant worst
case was late Feb, I decided I could cope with that and felt a great relief.
Why, I asked myself, was I so averse to going private? I had the money - about
£2000. Some of it was ideological - the typical leftie dislike of private
medicine, but I didn't feel too strongly about that. Then I realised that mjy
bad experience with private hearing aid providers was the main reason.
Last week I did my
last woodworking job for money - the end of a long run of difficult repair jobs
for the Slaters. From now until the op I would only do work for myself so that
if I made a mistake the customer wouldn't suffer.
Some days I see
really badly and start thinking again about booking a private appointment, but
I'm actually coping quite well at present because I am spending a lot of time
writing my book and really enjoying it.
I decided that this was partly as a result of other aspects of my life
becoming so restricted. When I had better hearing and much better sight there
were so many things I could do that I never felt like sitting down for long
enough to write seriously.
I'm fairly sure that
one of the reasons for my good frame of mind at present is that Mark has
prescribed a low-dose anti-depressant as a treatment for my stomach ache -
which he calls Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a term which covers all sorts of
different intractible problems. I'm not entirely sure it has seen off the IBS,
but I do seem to be more optimistic and calm than I used to be. This may be
because I am getting more sleep. I now find I can go back to sleep at the time
when I would normally have been leaping out of bed - well not leaping exactly,
more like levering myself out of bed.
So, I have made this
resolution: I am going to wait whatever happens. If I can no longer see my
screens to read and write I will spend more time just being - thinking,
walking, cycling, doing exercises. I can continue writing by dictation. It will
be very good for me to learn how to exist without constant information input.
8 December
I've stopped writing
the book. Most of the anomalies and omissions have been dealt with and it's
long enough. At first I felt elated - "I've finished a book!" but the
next day depression set in. It was all rubbish and would make me look silly. I
had a couple of bad days trying to read the computer screen.
Last week Thelma
rang the admissions people and they said it had been postponed and would not
now happen before March.
I decided to go
private.
All this stuff about
"just being" is all very well on a good day, but we've both had colds
for a fortnight, and I'm feeling a great sense of anti-climax now that so much
of my time is no longer spent writing.
29 December
I get waves of panic
when there is a step change. Yesterday was bad - total blur-out in the right
eye and left not much better. For the first time I struggled to read the white
on black type on my phone. Then I remembered I could increase the font size again
and it was better. Today I couldn't read my diagrams for the next bit or work
on the panelling - something I could do 2 weeks ago.
What happens if I
can't read at all before I can get the operation done? Even if I still can, for
a few days afterwards I will be unable to read.
New strategy: even
with three quarters of my hearing gone,
I can still hear after a fashion. And perhaps if I persevere with my
bluetooth headphones I will be able to watch videos and even perhaps listen to
music.
Help came from an
unlikely quarter - my much derided laptop is now gaining in my estimation. I
tried a few film trailers but the sound was too quiet. Then I realised I hadn't
turned up the volume on the headphones themselves. Try this music application. It
is an internet radio app and is asking me to suggest an artist, and it will
find other similar music. I type in "Sting" and here is Joan
Armitrading singing loud and clear. I try Massive Attack and get one of theirs
I'd not heard. Really good sound!
19 Jan 2013
I'm now counting
down the days. Two weeks ago we finally managed to get some sense out of the
private hospital near Carmarthen, but the best they could offer was mid
February. I decided to give up on Wales and look to the nearest bit of England.
Google soon came up with Optical Express in Bristol, and as I was typing in
details to get an appointment a "live chat" option popped up. Within
about 20 minutes I had got a price guide and an indication of availability, and
a few minutes later had booked an appointment for the next day!
Thelma and I did the
familiar trip to Bristol. The clinic was in the new Carbot Centre so for the
first time we parked in the multi-storey linked to the shopping centre by an
overhead walkway.
The appointment took
several hours. At the end of it I was offered one eye for just under 2k but
both for 3, and the promise that the second could be done a week after the
first. They had put some strong drops in my eyes so that they could see through
the cataracts better, and when I came out of the dark room into the main
reception hall of the building I was amazed by the strong colours and the
light. This altered perception took the edge off my disappointment when it
transpired I would have to stop taking my prostate drug "Flomaxtra"
for 2 weeks before the first op.
I signed up for 5
appointments beginning on the 23rd, and paid a deposit of £500.
Sitting in the car
on the way back I was thrilled by the amount I could see. I could even read my
phone screen without reversing the colours. What if the drops had made a
lasting improvement? I certainly didn't mind a long wait with this level of
sight.
The next day the
effect was still there, but on the third day the accustomed mix of gloom and
glare returned, seeming to be worse than ever. Since then I've struggled on
with the panelling job in the study. It's getting very hard to read a tape now
and I've had to give up using Sketchup to model the difficult bits - back to
trial and error.
The man who did the
eye tests said that the modern cataract operation came about because during the
war surgeons had operated on the eyes of air crews injured by shards of perspex
from shattered aircraft windows. They noticed that the eyes did not react to
bits of perspex embedded in them. From that came the plastic lens and more
recently the technique of using ultrasound to remove the clouded natural lens.
I've spent a lot of
time thinking about what sort of technology would be available in a sustainable
society, and it seems to me that this is a perfect example of a technology
which does not depend on fossil fuel - it is simple the result of an increase in
knowledge. How much of this knowledge would we have now if we had not exploited
fossil fuel? If for example human society had developed with a powerful taboo
on using something which cannot be replaced, would we have seen the exponential
growth in knowledge which we have seen in the last 100 years or so? It seems
one of our distant ancestors lived for thousands of years with the same
stone-chipping technology. It seems probable that our brains have changed
sufficiently in the last 2 thousand years to prevent this happening in the
future.
