eye surgery – Deborah Makarios

February 17, 2017October 19, 2017

Eyeless Entertainment

As habitual readers of this blog may recall, in October 2015 I decluttered my eyeballs. They have now settled into their new shape, and that shape being not yet perfect, I will shortly be having a touch-up surgery.

Those of you who get squicky about eyes may wish to pull something over yours at this point, before I get into details.
The original surgery was LASIK, where they make a flap on the front of your eyeball and carry on the earthworks underneath, before putting the flap back. For the touch-up, however, I will be having LASEK, where they just start straight in on the front of the eyeball. It’s like the difference between laying a pipe under a road, and resurfacing the road.

On the plus side, LASEK has a much lower chance of causing keratoconus (don’t look) and other unpleasant side effects. On the down side, the healing takes longer. The first three days, I have been told, are pretty unpleasant (whereas with the first surgery, the discomfort was mild and gone in hours) and then it’s a week before they take the bandage-lens off. Most disturbing of all, it could be weeks before my vision returns to normal, which is to say, capable of reading small print.

And as anyone who has known me for any amount of time will know, reading small print is pretty much my way of life. I came, I saw, I read.

The question is, then, what I shall do while my eyes recover. I’ve arranged for my work to carry on in my absence by having other people do the reading for me, but how shall I pass the time myself? Last time I borrowed a bunch of audiobooks, and it did not work out as well as I had hoped.

The thing is, you see, that I am a visual person. Audiobooks do not satisfy the reading urge, somehow, and nor does what I’ve heard stick. Of the various books I listened to, I don’t remember what most were, and of the one I remember most clearly, all I can remember is that the main character exclaims “By Timothy!” a lot, and the big scene at the end takes place in a house by a river. Apparently, if I can’t get my eyes into it, I can’t get my teeth into it either.

So what shall I do? For the initial, “miserable” stage, I am planning to listen to the BBC Pride and Prejudice – I’ve seen it so often I can follow along by ear anyway. Subsequently I’m planning to have a good amount of not-too-intricate knitting on hand – hopefully my sight will soon be up to that amount of detail. Also hopefully the Caped Gooseberry will read to me when he can. (Yes, I know I said I don’t take things in when I only hear them, but his voice is so nice I don’t really care.)

What other non-eye-dependent amusements might I solace my recuperation with? Learning Braille? Taking up scales and sword and going forth to wreak Justice? Ideas?

October 16, 2015October 19, 2017

The Quotidian QWERTYUIOP

December 6th, 2014: a wonderful day. I wrote “The End” on the first draft of my fantasy novel, provisionally titled Tsifira. It was the culmination of (cough) years of work. But the work was only beginning…

After spending six months on another project to clear my mind, I turned my attention to redrafting Tsifira. (I feel a bit silly calling it that, since that is the one title I can pretty much guarantee the finished book won’t have, but there it is. Working title.)

To prepare for the epic task, I had a week off, and then spent three or four weeks reading up craft books and taking notes on how to tackle it. And then I began.

Since I think best in long-hand, I had written the whole novel that way: filling seven 120-page exercise books. (Next time I shall just buy a ream or two and be done with it. I can count quires instead of volumes.) Typing it up, I assumed, would be a mere formality, a prelude to the actual work. After all, anyone can type.

Cats use hunt-and-peck; or rather, hunt-and-pounce.

I had reckoned without the sheer bulk of the thing. I can type up the text three to four times as fast as I wrote it, but…
I did the maths. Six pages was an average day working long-hand; twenty is a good day typing up. Seven 120-page exercise books contain 840 pages. Divide by 20 (pages per day) and that’s 42.

42 working days to type up the novel. Doesn’t sound like a lot, until you call it eight and a half weeks, and drop eye surgery in the middle of it.

Or, to look at it another way, since my typing speed is 60wpm, and the manuscript is approximately 158,840 words, typing it up should take about 2,647 minutes (and twenty seconds) – a little over 44 hours. That’s less than two days! assuming I don’t stop for tea, sleep, turning the page, or trying to figure out what exactly that squiggle says.

Suffice it to say that I began the typing up on the 29th of July, and I still have two and a half volumes to type. I am hoping to finish the lot by the end of October. I am also hoping never to write any draft so long again. I have finally understood the brilliance of early writers who did most of the drafting in their head, and only wrote down something already shaped as close as possible to the final form.

But every time I find myself frustrated by how long this process is taking, I remind myself that I have learnt a massive amount through it, and will no doubt learn more before I have finished with it.
And then I carry on typing.

October 2, 2015

Decluttering My Eyeballs

Warning: if you have a phobia about eyeballs, you probably shouldn’t read this post. Have a complimentary kitten picture, and move along, nothing to see here.

Still with me? On we go.

I didn’t do terribly well with my decluttering in August, and I was hoping things would improve in September. Well, yes and no.

Here’s my list:
one small spray-can of glasses-cleaner
one glasses-cleaning cloth
one glasses case (when I find it, although I may have inadvertently decluttered, i.e. lost, it already)
one pair of glasses
and, if I have all this terminology right:
fourteen and a half dioptres of myopia (eight from my right eye and six and a half from my left)
and six and a half dioptres of astigmatism (five and a quarter from my right eye and one and a quarter from my left)

This was not accomplished, you will doubtless be happy to hear, with secateurs. No; all I had to do was lie on a table and let my eyeballs be carved by lasers: first a flap on the front of each eyeball, and then a divot out of the underlayer of each cornea. Of the hooky metal tool used to lift the flap, I shall say nothing. Nor of the rather unpleasant smell, heavily reminiscent of the drilling of teeth.

The experience, I freely admit, was not a pleasant one, although I did get a barley-sugar for my pains (or more likely my trembles) afterwards. Nonetheless, I think it well worth enduring for the results. From being slightly less blind than a bat (and not even equipped with sonar) I am now possessed of excellent sight in one eye and passable sight in the other, which will improve as it comes to terms with being the shape of a football, instead of, er, a football.

The discomfort was over in hours, and aside from eye-drops and eye-shields (which I shall declutter in due course), I am free to resume my life. An interdiction on reading for the first 24-48 hours was easily surmounted by the acquisition of a stack of audio books (yay for libraries); and a month-long ban on eye makeup doesn’t affect me as I don’t wear makeup anyway. Swimming is also verboten for a month, and I am looking forward to resuming this fun-filled form of exercise – all the more so as I will now be able to find my way from changing-room to pool unaided.

It is really quite a novelty, this clearness of sight. I’m not sure quite when my eyes started to need spectacular assistance (sorry! sorry…) but it must be nearly a quarter of a century now. I could not remember what it was like to wake up and see clearly, instead of waking up and fumbling for glasses or lens case. It really takes some getting used to. I keep finding myself staring at things, not because I’ve never seen them before, but because now I can’t not see. The leaves on the tree across the yard. The edge of the curtain outlined against the street light. Remarkable.