My Eyes

In the late 90s I was trying to form a band in South Florida and I must have put an ad for a lead guitarist in the local arts paper or something. A guy¹ responded and we had an audition at our church². He set up his Ovation acoustic guitar on a stand on the stage³ while I went up to the balcony where the sound board was. Once we were ready to test the sound, he played a run up and down the neck that blew my hair back. He was the most technically skilled guitarist I’d met to that point. We “hired” him immediately.

Thus began a productive and weird relationship. He was older than us, probably in his early thirties. He had a wife and a couple of kids. He was an ophthalmologist, the head of an ophthalmology practice that, as far as I knew, he started. And then there was that guitar playing. Usually over-playing, but it’s hard to argue when it’s just so beautiful and impressive.

He claimed to have played guitar on the Tears for Fears record Raoul and The Kings of Spain, but never credited. I forget the details but I think the track in question was Sketches of Pain, which is a great track with a killer acoustic guitar part.⁴

He found out my best instrument was the drums and he formed a jazz fusion band. We rehearsed a few times–the tunes were his originals–but never gigged. It was fun music to play, though.

Our band played as a three-piece, mostly coffee shop gigs, and we were the house band for our church. He gave me that Ovation guitar.

We’d begun to grow apart after he joined a gigging jam band. It had probably been months since our last contact when his wife called my (now ex) wife. He had run off with a singer from that band. He’d taken off with some or all of their money. He’d lied to all of us about a lot of things, potentially about his ophthalmology credentials, almost certainly about his past. I don’t remember many more details, but his (soon to be ex) wife was gathering information for what was probably going to be an extended legal proceeding (and warning us in case he reached out). I never heard from him after that. We never heard from her again. It was the first of many WTF just happened and I have no idea what the real truth is here experiences in my life.

I sincerely wish I couldn’t have claimed many in that last sentence.

That was a lot of backstory to mention the one thing he said to me that has stuck with me all this time. He wore glasses, and with Lasik being a popular procedure at that time, and he himself running an eye surgery center that performed Lasik, I asked him why he hadn’t had it done.

“I’d never let anyone cut my eye,” he said. Or something like it.

So every time I considered Lasik I would remember my old friend, who may or may not have been an ophthalmologist, tell me he would never opt into the procedure he presumably performed on patients himself.

So when my ability to read text on my monitor rapidly degraded in the first half of this year, and I made my way to my optometrist, and she told me it wasn’t just that my prescription had changed, and she sent me to a retina specialist, and they did a bunch of scans and tests, and they told me my retina was fine, but I had this cataract, and so she sent me to an eye surgery place about this developing-more-rapidly-than-expected cataract in the middle of my lens, and they did a bunch of scans and tests, and they suggested cataract surgery, you would think I would have hesitated.

But my inability to read text on a computer screen was becoming an issue. I’d cranked up the OS zoom setting and increased the font sizes in everything. But “dark mode” was impossible. There was essentially a blurry drop-shadow on everything, but light-on-dark was twice as bad.

The surgery place also offered an ultimatum: if I was getting surgery, it had to happen within 90 days of their exam, or else I would have to get another exam.

And besides only knowing of people older than myself having to get cataract surgery, I’d never heard a bad story about it. Only good ones, actually.

So I contemplated my options, and decided to go ahead, and to spend more for optional extras that I thought would be worth it. I am 50–I hope to live with this synthetic lens in one eye for a long time.

Their option tiers were embarrassingly cringe. It seems as though tech, and maybe Apple specifically, has influenced every industry. The tiers above the basic surgery/lens were something like PRO, MAX, and MAX PRO.⁵

The surgery itself was smooth. I even had “near perfect blood pressure” and the doctor referred to me as an “almost perfect patient” during the laser-goes-chop-chop-on-my-original-lens portion of the proceedings.

I convalesced as instructed the rest of that day with my eye held shut with gauze and the giant plastic patch, then went back the next day for the follow-up.

Yes, there was the extreme light sensitivity they promised. But otherwise nothing alarming. They were in a big rush to get me through that appointment, though.

With the patch off the second day, I was hoping to begin enjoying my “fixed” eye. But between the light sensitivity, the discomfort, and the fact that now each eye had radically different prescriptions, I couldn’t really do anything.

By day three, a Sunday, I was crawling the walls. They’d so undersold the recovery time that I’d assumed I would be able to attend the jury duty I’d been assigned that Monday. Fortunately I’d realized on Friday that wasn’t going to happen and had Carissa call to ask for a deferral. I tried to work some, but reading anything was nearly impossible. Tuesday morning, after a brief mental break, and under some pressure to accomplish work, I reverted to actually calling people I would normally just email or Slack message. I embraced my pre-internet workflow. But both the boredom and the existential dread were getting heavy. Late Tuesday afternoon (day five) was my follow-up with my optometrist, who wasn’t in a hurry, and assured me my recovery was normal, and got me into a new contact for my left eye, and sent me to the CVS next door for reading glasses I could use to once again see anything closer than four feet away.

I’m on day 12 now and the irritation and light sensitivity are slowly improving. The drugstore readers that are allowing me to see what I’m typing are not great, as one would expect. I go back to the optometrist in nine more days.

I know my experience has been pretty typical, and that some people have it worse–some have to have a second surgery, and I’ve already learned of one person who died while under anesthesia during cataract surgery, which while always a risk feels more tragic given the “routine” nature of this type of procedure. But it has made clear 😜 how important eyes are, less because I missed taking in the beauty and colors of my surroundings and more because the primary way I take in information–and thus do my work–is visually. It also highlighted the numerous accessibility issues most software and web developers apparently never consider.

And gave me a chance to tell that weird story about my ophthalmologist band mate from 25 years ago.