Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Friday, December 6, 2019

Cataract Surgery: Day 2

Shorn little Pip
Pip is even cuter through my cataract-free eye!!
Here's today's update:
  • When I woke up, my eye was all gooped up. I get a bad reaction to dilation drops, so I think that was the problem. After my shower, it was just peachy. 
  • My pupil is almost back to normal. The dilation has to be pretty serious so the ophthalmologist can see what she's doing during surgery, and it takes over a day for the pupil to go back to normal. 
  • My pigeon floater is back!! For years I've had a floater in my right eye that is shaped like a soaring pigeon, wings held in a perfect V. I've looked for but haven't seen it since surgery, but today the little guy is back! Yes, floaters are a nuisance, but I've grown fond of this one. I switched ophthalmologists four years ago, and one of the things that told me I'd made the right choice was that she could see why it looked like a pigeon. Except that one, floaters haven't been very noticeable or a problem, and so far I haven't seen a single one since surgery.
  • I can use my binoculars!! I picked a distant object with clear lines and used the center focus knob to get it perfect through the left barrel, then used the diopter adjustment to get it focused through the right barrel. Now both barrels are perfect for my two eyes. I may have to do this once or twice more until my eye is fully healed, but it's SO nice to be able to use binoculars without glasses, so I can have the eyecups extended to block out peripheral light. I haven't been able to do that since I gave up my contact lenses over two decades ago. 
  • I don't need glasses at all for comfortably doing all but one of my normal activities. My left eye does the work when I'm looking at something close up (like my laptop) and my right eye takes over for distance things, like watching TV or looking out the window at birds. The one exception is working at my computer on my desk-treadmill. For this, at intermediate range, neither eye focuses well, and yesterday I got a headache trying. Today I tried with my computer glasses. It didn't quite work--they're perfect for my left eye, but oddly enough, help my right eye, too--only just a little, so both eyes are trying to do the work, but the right eye is off in a weird way.  I was still getting a headache until I figured out to keep that eye closed. So right now I have a folded tissue working as a patch inside the right lens of my glasses, so am writing this with monocular vision. This issue will be resolved perfectly after the other eye is fixed on the 18th. 
  • It's cloudy now, but it was very sunny when I filled the feeders a while ago. But now that my pupil is closing again, it wasn't uncomfortably bright without sunglasses. Just beautifully bright. 
  • WOW! I just used my camera. The viewfinder eyepiece didn't require hardly any tweaking, and I can see SO much better through it now, both from the clearer vision and because I'm not wearing glasses, holding my eye further back.