It's the same surgery you would have if you had a cataracts and your cloudy lens was replaced with a non-cloudy (or clear) one. I had hardening of the lenses so replacing them with artificial ones helped regain my vision.
There were some adjustments that needed to be made and it took some months before I was really in a position where I wasn't in need of distance or near glasses. By the time I was finished, I had experienced about every kind of vision you can think of, aside from being blind. I now know what it's like not be able to recognize who's standing across the room and I have lived through not being able to tell how many fingers I was holding up on my own hand.
It took a while and aside from a few little things, I don't think about my vision that much. Yesterday though, I discovered an interesting advantage to my artificial eyes.
We set up the front porch in preparation for Halloween. I have this plan to hand out adult beverages on the 31st (as well as candy for the children). I've been spending lots of time on this beverage plan and it's been evolving steadily. At this point it involves glow sticks, blood collection vials and black lights.
We set up the black lights in the interior areas of the porch, aiming them in at the door. This way when I come out to deliver a black-light reactive beverage to thirsty adults, it will have a luminous glow as I step out onto the porch.
These two black lights are cool. They're purple cool. They light up the entire interior of our porch with a beautiful purple glow. My husband and I were testing the glowing vials to see which mix of liquids glowed the most and I started talking about the purple. "What purple", my husband said? "The purple aura from the lights. The cool purple glow all around us." He didn't see it.
We did some tests. I could definitely see something he couldn't. There was a band of purple on the wall in the entryway that was strikingly obvious to me that he couldn't discern at all. When I put my hand over the purple area my clear nail polish glowed green...and he could see that, but it couldn't see the purple light.
He said, "it's your bionic eyes!" I remember when I had the first eye done (they do one at a time) and how it was striking how some colors were the same in both eyes and other colors were significantly different across the natural lens and the artificial one. The chair in our living room had much different shades of brown and rust for a few weeks until the second eye was done. I wanted desperately to take a picture of the difference, but I couldn't manage to get a camera into my brain to do so, so I was stuck trying to describe it to people.
I wondered if it was the artificial lenses, or if it was the natural change of a human lens over time. Were older people more likely to not be able to see the color difference because their lenses had changed or stopped letting in certain light waves? Uncle Jonathan (who is in his early thirties) said he could see a little purple tonight when we asked him but it wasn't really bright it didn't sound like. My sitter (who is seventeen) said she could see the purple, including the purple band on the wall in the entry way.
Is it my bionic eyes or is it age? I don't know, but it's pretty cool to see that bright purple light and know I can see something invisible to other people.
The Big Boy Update: We were at a birthday party this past weekend at a roller skating rink. My son was excited to get some roller skates and try skating. We headed over to get fitted for skates but when I got to the counter, my son wasn't there. I looked back and he was all the way at the other side of the rink, stuck in the same place, never having moved a step...because he got sucked into something on the television. He's hit that age. He can get glued to the spot when something grabs his attention on the television.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter got to ride in, "The Awesome Car" (the Tesla) yesterday with daddy. He drove normally and calmly until one point when he needed to get out into traffic. The Tesla moves when you ask it to, and it moves fast. When he did that my daughter said, "woah!" Then she said, "I wanna do that again." She said that after every time my husband hit the acceleration for her. You don't have to go fast to get the feeling of acceleration that my daughter clearly thought was fun.
Fitness Update: Yoga again at the clubhouse today. Yoga is humbling. You don't even break a sweat, but boy is it hard.
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