“How about pain? What should I expect while I’m recovering?” I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked is “Will it flipping work?” The other day, my wife Susan drove me to the Lancaster Surgery Center, an hour-and-twenty-minutes away. A well-respected ophthalmological surgeon cut and shortened the muscles that control my eyeballs. This is strabismus surgery, an intervention for double vision.
“I saw the doctor because I’ve been having double vision.”
“Oh wow, what did he say?”
“He told me not to drink so much.” Ba-dum-tss.
My vision has been in a slow slide for years. I first had strabismus surgery in 1997. In 2006 my vision began to double again. It’s been held in check by eyeglasses that include prescriptive prisms. The prisms bend light, causing my eyes, which drift to the outer corners, to see what’s directly in front of me. As my vision worsened, the prisms became thicker. Eighteen years later I’ve hit the point where adding additional prism is no longer possible. I’ve reached the correctable limit. So surgery.
The day turned out to be uneventful. The hardest part was enduring sixteen hours without food. And of course my inability to see anything after the surgery. I needed time to get used to my new eye muscles. Everything was still doubled, just less double than before. But I was also wearing new glasses without prisms, so my vision was way worse after surgery than it was before surgery with the prism glasses.
Yesterday, still seeing everything in duplicate, my son Eli took me to see the eye doctor. As we waited at the stop sign to exit our neighborhood, a powder blue convertible from the fifties passed in front of us. An eight-wheeler! Two back wheels on each side, one in front of the other, and two front wheels too. I told Eli, and he was distraught that he missed it. He just didn’t notice. A few minutes later, I realized that I was just seeing the wheels in double. Eli and I had a good laugh.
My vision actually improved a little as we traveled back to Lancaster. Possibly looking at a variety of distances (rather than just trying to read my computer screen) helped teach my eyes to focus. The doctor measured my double vision and declared his work ‘perfect.’ “Oh, but I might have over-corrected a bit on the right side.”
My rapport with the doctor seems to have crumbled. It was unclear whether he acknowledged that I am still seeing double vision, and he gave no indication if that was expected. He didn’t give me any hopeful information, and when I asked if my vision would improve, he didn’t answer. He suggested that I don’t drive a car until I feel comfortable with that. It sort of felt like a CYA by a doctor who knows he botched a job—but I might be reaching here.
What the doctor never said is something Susan and I looked up on the internet last night. It might take a couple of weeks for me to be able to reliably see single images again. Right now, if I’m sitting still and looking straight ahead or on an angle to the left, my double vision is gone. When I’m on the move—walking or riding in a car—or looking on an angle to the right everything is doubled (that over-correction he mentioned). I went for a walk this morning. Because of the constant movement, everything was double all the time. Disconcerting, and kind of scary crossing busy roads. I wasn’t confident that cars weren’t coming.
So what’s my prognosis on a full recovery? God, I sure hope so. I’m a long way off from being able to drive a car or ride a bike. I think I can sit in my office and do my work with reasonable visual acuity. My next appointment is 5/06. I think the doctor expects my vision to have mostly corrected itself by then, but again, he never actually said that. I’m going to see how things are working on Monday. If my vision isn’t improving, I plan to reach out to him again, this time in writing, listing all my concerns. Maybe I’ll just send him a link to this post.
Update – Surgery plus four days: All objects straight ahead and off to the left are crystal clear, single images. All objects off to the right side of my field of vision are doubled.
Surgery plus six: This is still improving.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
