I was born with imperfect eyes.
MYOPIA, aka “Nearsightedness” shifted my eye’s focal range closer than normal.
ADVANTAGE:
-That let me bring objects closer to my face, giving a little extra magnification without needing a magnifying device like reading glasses.
DISADVANTAGE:
-That prevented me from focusing well on things farther than a nearby wall, requiring glasses for most computer screens, TV, dance classes, martial arts classes, and artistic events. Driving safely was possible but needed a lot of planning, interpretation, and heightened awareness.
-The need to monitor my niece at a water park a few years ago saw me lose the glasses in a wave pool.
-Using a Virtual Reality headset with prescription glasses was doable but uncomfortable.
-Work required constantly taking the glasses on and off in order to shift from looking at electronics, to looking at my laptop, to looking at students, to looking at the rest of the world, and finally drove me to do the surgery.
ASTIGMATISM is a measure of how un-spherical your eyeball is.
A normal eye is more or less spherical like a ball and if you are looking at a point source of light like a street light or headlight in the distance, it will focus to a point on your retina.
An astigmatic eye is flattened along one direction. (Picture the completely impossible worst case as your eye being a cylinder, shaped like a soup can) The result is that each point of light from the world gets stretched into a line, and the world looks just a little bit like a funhouse mirror reflection. On top of that, because all of those lines overlap with other lines, contrast is reduced and edges are blurred in the direction of the defect.
CATARACTS are a few different things depending on what type they are.
ADVANTAGE: None
DISADVANTAGE:
Cataracts can be a simple clouding of the lens that reduces contrast, or can have some crystalline aspects that cause a starburst effect.
My congenital cataracts (meaning I was born with them) gave me both.
-Point light sources like those evil projector-style headlights were painful, blinding starbursts.
-If someone or something was backlit (standing in front of a window or curtain), cataracts turned them into featureless silhouettes. Forget trying to get non-verbal cues in a conversation, or being able to see my wife trying to get my attention at the roller-skating rink.
-Using microscopes, binoculars, telescopes or any other similar device that created a structured light source literally projected a ghost image of my cataracts onto the retina.
You know how sometimes you (perfect vision or not) can see “floaters”…the little dots and strings of material floating in your eyeball that look like atoms and molecules?
Imagine having one very large one dead center in your field of view, like a faint pebbly smudge you can’t wipe off.
I put the surgery off for many years due to anxiety mostly, but also the belief / understanding / misunderstanding that if were to have my biological, auto-focusing lenses replaced with implants, I would have clearer vision, but still need glasses to do near or far.
And what if the surgery left me with worse vision?
And what if there was an infection or constant “there’s something in my eye” sensations for the rest of my life?
And what if…what if…what if…
I’d gone 48 years without surgery and my eyes weren’t getting worse.
Why risk losing what I did have?
The frustration outweighed the anxiety eventually, so I made an appointment to update my prescription and talk options. Interestingly, my prescription was slightly better than it had been 4 or 5 years ago, and my corrected vision was nearly 20/20 even with all the defects.
May 17, Eye checkup and referral
May 23, Surgery Confirmation
May 30, Biometry
July 20, Surgery with multi-focal implants in both eyes
July 21, Already seeing better than ever, minus the close focus of my old eyes. Had to get my eyes “burped” to relieve some excess pressure.
July 22, So far, so good…damned good actually!
More details and an art project to come later.
MECHATRONICS dOt LIFE 