I usually don't write about personal experiences. Not that there is any reason not to, I just don;t find my own life all that interesting. Today, however, was interesting. About 3 weeks ago, I had cataract surgery for my left eye, today for my right. Being a nurse for 40 years or thereabouts, I thought I knew a bit about neurophysiology and the body's reaction to surgical intervention.
Well I have a lot to learn. My wife is a retired neuro/radiology RN and she and I talked shop a lot. In fact, we met shortly after graduation from nursing school arguing across a bed on a medsurg unit about how to best make a bed for a GI bleeder. Not to get too graphic, but a serious GI bleed is nothing to take lightly, it is usually fatal, if precipitated by a systemic medical condition like terminal blood disease, cancer, liver failure, end stage alcoholic complications, or chemical poisoning to name a few.
The making of a bed to hold a really bad GI bleed is important both in terms of managing the patient and keeping the floor from becoming something out of a low budget slasher movie, and believe me, blood is both sticky and slippery at the same time. When a patient is trying their very best to leave this world, you literally are running like mad most of the time to keep them from doing that. But I digress.
She has explained the mechanism of brain damaged patients having to relearn everything from smells, taste, sounds and visual cues to writing and fine motor skills post CVA (stroke) or traumatic brain injuries. Surgery is not just physically and emotionally insulting to the person, it actually resets your brain in some instances.
In the case of eye surgery, the changes in vision are not just physiologic, but neurologic as well. When you have your natural lens removed and replaced with an artificial lens, your eye and brain both have their bitch sessions about it. The brain needs some time to take in the presence of a horizon in the lens (the edge of the lens) as well a going from a comfortable hazy and blurred picture of the world to one of much brighter lights and color as well as unblurred images that are a massive change from even a few minutes prior to surgery.
Your eye thinks (correctly) it has been injured, and it doesn't like it at all. So your eye muscles and those around the eyes are constantly in spasm, twitching or all of the above. The brain doesn't like that either, not to mention that it's both uncomfortable and irritating. All of this stuff can and does impact one's normally sunny disposition and makes on a bit scrappy.
So, while my left eye surgery was relatively uneventful, today's surgery has really pissed everyone off. My vision is slightly blurred, although not hazy, the brain doesn't know how to take that, at least not gracefully, and the right eye isn't taking the physical irritation quite as gracefully as the left did, either. I am assured this is perfectly normal and the blurriness will go away, trust me I'm a nurse. Well so am I and while professionally I know you are probably giving me great patient teaching, I am not quite willing to buy it because it is me. Not a patient, not someone else, it's me: me doesn't like this, doesn't trust that it is "normal" and is suspicious that this misery will be permanent. Did I mention that nurses make THE WORST patients? We know the truth, we know you are just reassuring us so we can die peacefully and we know that secretly, you just pushed the crash cart to the door of our room.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss, in fact, most of the time it is. And so it goes. Thanks for listening. I hope to see y'all in the AM with bilateral clear vision, and that I don't die of complications overnight. :-)
