Eyes

A bright and blurry world after cataract surgery

I’ve been living in a bright and blurry world since cataract surgeries on both eyes during July, which has kept me close to the house and anxious. I opted to stay a little nearsighted because I like wearing glasses.

But I also prefer to see things up close without glasses and immerse myself in books and writing. The late Ada Long, a professor here at UAB whom I never met but have heard so much about, chose the same kind of surgery because she didn’t want anything to come between her and her books, and I feel the same way. When my friend, Tina Braziel, told me this about Ada, it was such a comfort.

Still, when I look up from reading or writing the world is now blurry and strange. I have to wait for my eyes to fully heal before I can get a new pair of glasses, so it will be another few weeks of depending on Kiffen to drive or guide me around a fallen tree after a storm on Vulcan Trail when we walk late at night as we’ve been doing, as it’s cooler at night in this brutal Alabama heat. Still, I feel self-conscious going out into the world without glasses because I can’t see people’s faces until I get up close, and that’s weird - nobody needs me peering into their faces to try to guess what they are thinking.

I’m also not used to my face without glasses, and all the petty childhood stuff roars back.

You look weird without glasses.

You look weird with glasses.

You look better with glasses.

You looked better without glasses.

Once, my high school boyfriend said to me, “Your eyes are so pretty without your contact lenses.”

Um, thanks?

It was such a random thing to say because I ever only wore contacts since I couldn’t see anything without them. I didn’t wear glasses in those days - just contacts.

Naturally, I stewed on that comment for decades.

So the world feels blurry and strange right now, and I feel old.

My eye doctor called me after the second cataract surgery and said, “How’s it going?”

I said, “Actually, it hurts a little more the second time - like something is in my eye, and I’m tearing up more.”

“Sounds about right. That’s what most people say - the second one is harder. Who knows why? It’s all normal. Good thing you don’t have a third eye. See you tomorrow.”

And it all was normal at the follow-up, and now, four days post-surgery, things are even better. I do have something called “Fuchs Dystrophy” which could mean corneal replacement down the road.

Yikes.

My eye doctor delivered the news matter-of-factly in June and gave me a tissue when I started to cry.

Fuchs? What? I could think of another word to call it and did, although not aloud in the exam office.

But she promised it was no big deal, and we’d get through the cataracts first and then worry about the Fuchs Dystrophy if needed.

Anyway, both eyes are recovering, and I’m trying to keep track of the drops in each one - only two drops in one eye, and four drops in the other, and next week, it will be one drop in one eye and three dops in the other. At night, I’ll wear an eye shield on my left eye for another few days.

No heavy lifting, head level, sleep on my back, not too much screen time…

Between the surgeries that were two weeks apart, I went without the right lens in my glasses and saw the world from divergent perspectives.

But after the first surgery, it did feel like an LED light was shining out of my right eye as the sunflowers on the table burst in color, and I could even see in the shower. I haven’t been able to see in the shower in forever and read the words on the shampoo bottles. My world is now full of bright blurry colors, sharp yellows, brilliant blues, and soothing lavenders.

I’ve been nearsighted, horribly nearsighted, since third grade. Second grade was normal but by the third grade, I couldn’t see the board from the front row.

After an eye exam when I was nine, the ophthalmologist said, “I need to talk to your mother.” His voice was solemn and concerned. They went outside so of course, I did what most any kid would do. I jumped out of the chair to eavesdrop at the door and heard him tell her, “Your daughter is blind. Absolutely blind without glasses.”

Blind. Absolutely blind.

Cue the hysteria. Alarm bells clanged, and I lost my mind, positive I was going blind, but I was shy so I waited until we got into the car to start crying, missing the whole “without glasses” part.

Mom said, “He didn’t mean you were going blind for God’s sake. You need to wear glasses. That’s all, calm down.”

“But what about Jim Speed?”

Around that time, there was an Iowa basketball player, Jim Speed, and I can still recall an article in the Ames Daily Tribune with a headline that said something like: “The Sightless Jim Speed” and how Jim Speed went blind overnight and felt like his eyes were swollen shut trying to see into the bathroom mirror.

We were living in Ames, Iowa and Dad was coaching for the Iowa State Cyclones.

The basketball player, Jim Speed, was on the sports page almost daily with details of his sudden blindness at the University of Iowa.

Dad would shake his head and say, “Son of a bitch, it’s not right. The poor guy. Damn. Damn. Such talent.”

“What about the ‘sightless Jim Speed?” I yelled at my mom again as she drove us home. “He’ll never play basketball. What about him?”

My mother sighed, not one to indulge a child’s hysterics. “That is not going to happen to you. That was a tragedy. He got sick. It’s very, very sad. Now control yourself.”

"What about Helen Keller?”

“What about her? Stop this right now. Stop it! I’m going to have an accident with you distracting me.”

My poor mom, mother of four, was done, but I wasn’t. I had heard the words of the ophthalmologist.

Blind. Absolutely blind.

So I went home and practiced being blind. I covered my eyes and felt my way around the house and worked myself into a wild, frenzied state of anxiety. When I sobbed that I was going to go blind soon at the dinner table that night, Dad yelled, “Nobody is going blind in this house!”

I said, “How do you know?”

“Because I said so! Now knock off the bullshit, Aunt Gertrude!” (His nickname for me.)

It was a relief that my father decreed it so. Maybe he was right. Maybe, it wouldn’t happen. But I kept waiting. Imagining. Then I got glasses, and my gentle grandfather, on a visit, said, “You got your eyes from me, honey. I didn’t know there were leaves on the trees until I was fourteen. I was so nearsighted.”

That helped me to hear those words. Everybody else in the family including my parents had perfect eyesight. When Dad took me to get glasses, he said, “How about these octagon-shaped ones? Those are in style. You’ll look snazzy.”

Yep, super snazzy!

But I still kept reading books about blind kids. Helen Keller and another called “Follow My Leader” about a kid, Jimmy, who lights a firecracker - when he’s NOT supposed to - and it blows up in his face and he has to learn how to be blind. “Leader” is the name of his guide dog. It was so suspenseful as the bandages began to come off, but he still couldn’t see because - spoiler - the bandages WERE off. The book was by James B. Garfield, a blind author who lost his sight in his sixties. It was so real and believable, and I tried to get other kids to read it too.

I read the book “Helen Keller” by Margaret Davidson, especially the chapter, “A Strange Fever,” and thought a lot about scarlet fever and how Helen couldn’t hear the dinner bell or see the light shining into her face and her mother knew the truth. Sometimes, I made my little sister, Keely, play Helen getting scarlet fever and me crying over her, “Dead God, don’t let this child go blind and deaf.”

I read about Louise Braille, the awl he was poking into a piece of leather, and how it slipped and blinded him, and how he later created the Braille Alphabet. Margaret Davidson wrote about him too.

After I got my glasses, a fourth-grade boy came straight up to me after school, pretending to be blind, taunting me.

He stretched out his arms, trying to feel his way, his eyes blank, and yelled, “Oh no. I’m blind. I can’t see. I’m turning into Helen Keller. Help me! It’s all dark.”

I hated that kid - Mitchell Rolling.

I grabbed one of his waving arms and jerked it hard, and somehow it made him flip through the air and land on his back. I didn’t expect that to happen. I just wanted him to leave me alone. I’m sure he was embarrassed because he got up fast and ran away but my mother was pulling up to the curb at St. Cecilia’s and saw everything. Her own eyes got wide with horror.

“You get in this car now, Missy! What if the nuns saw you? You big bully. The poor boy, beating him up like that! What were you thinking?”

I tried to explain he was making fun of Helen Keller and me, but she said, “I don’t want to hear another word about Helen Keller or blindness ever again. Get in this car, right now!”

“Fine!”

When Keely got scarlet fever in the 8th grade, she broke down in the doctor’s office crying about Helen Keller. The doctor, alarmed, said, “We have antibiotics now. They didn’t have them in Helen’s time. You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

My mother called me at college and said, “I want you to know your sick imagination is still at work. Your poor little sister has scarlet fever and had a tizzy of a meltdown in the doctor’s office today.”

I apologized more than a few times for the “Helen Keller” or orphan dramas (Oliver Twist) we put on during long Saturday or Sunday afternoons. But Keely was the perfectly innocent character actor/sister for our trauma/dramas since the boys refused to participate. We always ate ice cream or Kraft singles on crackers as our reward afterward with our dog, Clancy, who always played the blind grandmother.

Here is little Keely…

I don’t have any pictures of Clancy, the black lab, playing the blind grandmother, but he looked a little like this. (My mom’s dog, Little Bit, a few years ago.)

***

As a young mother with babies and toddlers, contact lenses stopped working for me when I got an eye infection. I remember sitting in sandboxes in Silver Lake in the blazing sun wearing old-folks, wrap-around sunglasses because the bright hot California sunlight hurt so badly. I ditched the contact lenses for good and wound up wearing glasses to avoid the infection ever happening again, and I wore sunglasses over my real glasses and sunhats.

As the kids were growing, I wrote a book about a blind child called “Gentle’s Holler” who comes from a huge family, and her siblings taught her how to see colors by connecting colors to the senses. I interviewed some students and parents at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles and later recorded the book there. My sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, recorded songs for the book and the following sequels about the Weems family.

Here is one of the songs called “Colors” sung by Tomi and written by Livy Two Weems, the protagonist in “Gentle’s Holler” talking to her sister, Gentle.

Purple is the smell in the air before it rains. Red is the color of Mama’s biscuits baking in the oven. Yellow is the buttery sunshine on your face.

When “Gentle’s Holler” first came out, Lucy’s orthodontist read it and after Lucy’s appointments, he kept asking if there was some way I could write a sequel for “Gentle” to get her eyesight back. He was such a kind man and so worried about this fictional character whose mother had contracted German Measles while pregnant with Gentle and that’s why she was blind. I remember watching a movie in school about a mother who gets rubella while pregnant and her child is born blind.

Before my book tour with “Gentle’s Holler,” I wanted new glasses because I’d be driving all over the Smoky Mountains doing school visits. I took my kids with me, and they were being silly and laughing in the exam room. But it was a fun outing because they were helping me pick out new glasses - except when I started to read/not read the eye chart, they got super quiet when I couldn’t read anything.

The huge silence emanating from them was one of grave concern.

I heard the youngest finally whisper, “Is Mama blind?”

No, I wasn’t. I just needed new glasses.

So I’ll stick close to home for a few more weeks, grateful for the bright blurry colors, ophthalmologists, and insurance, and grateful for today.

***

Coming Soon - “My Grandmother’s Rotary Telephone and Family Connections”