A BRAND NEW WORLD

Since last Thursday, I’m living in a brand new world.

Over the course of last year and the year before, I had three surgeries on my left eye. One on the retina, one to remove a cataract the first surgery caused, and a final one, a laser procedure, to improve the results of the first two. 

Suddenly, I had a left eye that could see quite well. At that time, that was a major advancement. But after that eye healed—the cataract operation was more traumatic than normal because of the previous retinal procedure and because the cataract had been in there so long that it had grown tough and hard to remove—the lens prescriptions the surgeon wrote me were less than effective for reading, and for writing on the laptop, which are my principal activities. But when I complained about this, the surgeon gave me another eye test and insisted that, with corrective lenses, I was seeing “one hundred percent in both eyes.”

The guy who turned me on to the nature of the problem was the optician, who is a highly experienced professional. I went to him to see if I could finagle a more powerful mid-range prescription for my computer glasses. He refused, saying, “The problem you’re having isn’t one that can be solved with more augmentation. It’s that your left eye is now almost perfect and your right eye requires a plus-4.75 augmentation. I think that’s causing you to have a problem of focus.”

In other words, it wasn’t that, “with corrective lenses, I was seeing one hundred percent in both eyes,” but rather that, with glasses, I was seeing one hundred percent with each eye. I just wasn’t able to focus when I put the two together.

I took this theory to the surgeon who scratched his chin and said, “Hmmm, yes, maybe. But the prescription I gave you is correct.”

So for a while, more than a year, in fact, I took that to be the new norm. I was just never going to see correctly again. It was what it was and I’d have to live with it. Part of getting older. I should be grateful, I told myself, that my vision was, at least, now close to perfect in one eye.

But, I being me, I decided to go back to the ophthalmologist I’d had prior to the three left-eye operations. She said the eye that had been operated on was doing quite well and that I’d recovered almost twenty-twenty vision in it. Other than a remaining small distortion from a defect in the macula that the retina operation had failed to correct, that eye was seeing as well as it possibly could.  “Actually, she said, for long-distance vision, you see better with no prescription than with the slight augmentation you have in your glasses now for the left eye. As for the other eye, the plus-4.75 prescription I was using was correct, but she wanted to run more tests.

So I had another appointment with a colleague of hers, who moved me around from one machine to another, showing me all sorts of light shows and running a tomography scan. Then, I got sent back to her. “That eye,” she said, “has a pretty major cataract. That, combined with your need for such a high augmentation in that eye, and the fact that the other one has almost perfect vision…well, I’m not surprised you’re having trouble seeing properly. That cataract should be operated on and a lens put in. You can take these results back to your surgeon, or, we can operate here.

“Let’s do it,” I said, “and the sooner the better.”

Within a week, I had an appointment with their surgeon, who was also the head of that ophthalmological institute, which was named after him.

I quickly learned that, besides being a crackerjack eye surgeon, Patricio, the doctor, is also a people person. He’s interested in everyone else’s story, and has a whopper of his own. I knew right away, from his accent in Spanish, that he wasn’t originally from Patagonia or from Buenos Aires. Patagonia is in southern Argentina and his accent was definitely from the north. Tucumán Province, it turns out, a lush, green place known as “the garden of the Republic.”  I later found out that he, like myself, has lived in Patagonia for nearly thirty years, but, fortunately for me, divides his professional practice between the ski resort town near my home, and his own province in the north.

He also picked up on my accent in Spanish and asked where I was from originally.

“The US,” I said.

“I know a bit of the US,” he said. “Where abouts?”

“Ohio.”

“That’s in the north, right?”

“Yes, just below Michigan and between Pennsylvania and Indiana. Borders on the Ohio River in the south and Lake Erie in the north.”

“Which city?”

“Well, I’m not from the city. I’m from a small rural town.”

“Oh? What’s it called?” he asked.

“Wapakoneta.”

“Say again?”

“Wa_pa_ko_ne_ta.”

“A Native American name, of course,” he said more than asked.

“Exactly, I said. “It was the chief council house of the Shawnee Nation, before the whites screwed them over, went back on a reservation deal, and marched them off to Kansas. The tribe is now based in Oklahoma and numbers less than eight thousand today, I think.”

“I’ve been to Oklahoma!” he said. “Tulsa.”

One small step...Neil lands on the moon

“Other than that, Wapakoneta is famous for pretty much only one thing,” I said. “Being the home town of Neil Armstrong, the first…”

“The first man on the moon!” he broke in. “Of course, I know who Neil Armstrong was!”

Turns out eyes aren’t Patricio’s only interest. He is also a knowledgeable aerospace enthusiast and a civil pilot himself. In that regard, he said, “When we have more time, I’ll tell you about how my flying and Tulsa are connected.”

Neil's mom, Viola...I was her paperboy

For right now, however, he was fascinated with every detail I could tell him about Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong and Ohio’s history in aerospace. I told him every anecdote I knew—the Armstrong Museum, the bike Neil rode to deliver papers and save money for flying lessons, the legend about his having a pilot’s license before he could drive a car, his adventures as a test pilot and America’s first civilian astronaut, and so on. I also told him about how Neil had played basketball with my Uncle Don in high school, and how I’d been Neil’s mother’s paperboy, how she’d invite me in on cold winter days to warm up and have some hot chocolate, and how she’d let me hold a scale model of Neil’s X-15 rocket plane, “if I was really careful with it.”

The doctor was spellbound and added stories of his own from his aerospace research. And that led us to talk about the Wright Brothers, my visits to Kitty Hawk when I was in the Army, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, UFO research…

Only when we were finished with that conversation did we talk about my eyes. He patiently explained that when one eye is twenty-twenty, if the augmentation needed in the other eye is anything over plus-3.00, “The brain simply can’t compute it,” he said, “and there’s no way that the eyes are going to function correctly together. The good news is that the retina, macula and eye in general on that side are in great shape. I can operate on that, put a good lens, like a Bausch and Lomb, in there, and you won’t need glasses except to read.”

Patricio scheduled me for the operation just three days later. His assistant gave me a regimen of eye-drop applications for that morning. I began with that early since it’s a long drive to town. My wife, Virginia, drove me and as she did, I kept checking my watch and applying drops as required. 

We arrived more than an hour early. I talked to Patricio’s assistant. She said I should do one more application of one of the eye-drops and three more, one every fifteen minutes, of the other kind. That one was to dilate my pupil. While I was sitting there, my optometrist passed by, said hello, then laughed and said, “Your pupil’s this big,” and she made a circle with her two hands about the size of a saucer. “Good luck!” she said and slipped into her consulting room.

One after another, patients were being called into the operating room. One about every half-hour to forty minutes. While one was being operated on, another was being prepped.

The doctor was running a little late. After three procedures on the other eye, it should have been a walk in the park for me, but I’m always antsy before a medical procedure, and especially anything to do with my eyes. My surgery was supposed to be at ten-thirty, but it was well after eleven when my name was called.

A very nice young woman, masked up and in operating room garb, led me into what was, basically, a one-person, pocket-sized eye clinic. It was modern, bright, immaculate and fully equipped with ultra-modern gadgets. She showed me into a dressing room with a comfortable armchair, invited me to strip to my underwear, and left me with a folded pile of things that included a disposable hospital gown, a hairnet and two similar nets to cover my feet.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to get you,” she said amiably.

When it was time, she led me into a miniature operating room that truly looked like it belonged to an aerospace enthusiast. As soon as the doctor saw me, he said, “Dan! Good to see you! Climb up onto the table and we’ll accommodate you.” As the two women assisting him adjusted my head in a kind of restraint, strapped a blood pressure cuff on my arm and helped him disinfect my face, which I had already washed thoroughly with iodine soap, and place a surgical drape around my eye—there was no IV sedation drip as in my first two operations—he was regaling the two women with all of the Armstrong anecdotes that I’d told him the day before. He also told them about Wapakoneta, about Ohio, and about everything he could remember from our earlier conversation.

As one of the women was dripping local anesthetic into my eye, the doctor said, “So, I told you I was going to tell you how I ended up in Tulsa. What I didn’t tell you is that it was also where I accidentally met up with Obama.”

And from that moment on until the operation was done, Patricio was storytelling nonstop. I kept wondering, “How does this man do it?!” Telling stories, one after another, while handling such a precise operation. The only answer seems to me to be that he’s a genius and an extraordinary eye surgeon.

“So anyway,” he said, “there were three of us flying some Cessnas from the US to Argentina. Tulsa was a logical rest and refueling point. So we land in this small Tulsa airport. I found the security quite lax for pilots…Dan, you’re going to feel a little pressure now, but you shouldn’t feel pain—if you do, let me know…So we go into this room where there were maps and a screen with flight route and weather information. There was this index with details on every airport in the world! Really incredible stuff…A little pressure again now, Dan…So we’re there basically playing. I mean there’s nothing there we really need. It takes a while for us to notice this guy who’s standing by the door, obviously waiting for us to be done. His uniform was razor sharp, and he had close-cropped hair and a carefully trimmed mustache…Look down, Dan. Good…And he just stood there politely waiting his turn. You know who it was? Obama’s pilot!

“We had no idea the president was coming to that airport. Outside now, there was a big military escort and a motorcade maybe two hundred meters long on the tarmac. It seems the US presidency has several planes. This was a small jet, not the huge Air Force One Boeing 747 that most people think of as the president’s plane…Okay, roll your eyes up now…Good…

Obama - presidential plane 

“Seeing us there with our mouths hanging open, Obama took a minute to say hello. The entire contingent was super polite and amiable, and the following morning, when we went back to pick up our planes and move on, you never would have known that the president of the United States had been there the day before. Not one vestige of his passing remained. I’ll never forget it.”

I said, “I don’t think anything would happen like that now. Obama was a very special president.  And with Trump? Well, they’d probably have had the three of you on the ground with your hands behind your heads.”

“There.” Patricio said, removing the drape from my face. “You’re good to go! Sit up on the edge of the table a minute before you get up. Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” I said.

“So, no more glasses for you except to read. It’s probably a little blurry now, but you can tell, right? You can tell how much better you’re seeing, can’t you?”

“Amazing!” I said. “Thank you, Patricio.”

“Don’t mention it. My assistant will take you back to the dressing room now. Great talking to you, Dan!” he said, as if we’d just had coffee together rather than my having had eye surgery.

After I put my clothes back on, I had to go down a narrow corridor past the ceiling-to-floor glass wall of the operating room to get to the entrance. As I passed, the surgeon, who already had another patient on the table, waved and called out, “Chau, Dan! Talk to you tomorrow.”

Outside, the receptionist scheduled me for a post-op check-up the next day at one. Virginia and I left the clinic and went around the corner to a coffee shop for an express and croissant. I kept my dark glasses on—polarized clip-ons that I’d attached to a frame from which I’d removed the lenses—because my pupil was still dilated and the light flooded in. But already I was amazed at what I could see. I found myself reading my phone without glasses and the details of everything I saw were sharp and clear. When we returned home and I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time, and I was amazed to see that my eye wasn’t even red—the other eye had been red for days after two of my earlier surgeries. In fact, looking at the two eyes together, I’d never have guessed which had been operated on.

Not wanting to strain the eye, I left my phone in my studio and stayed away from my laptop. I had a nap and then began an ever-decreasing routine of eye-drop applications that is to last about three weeks.  But that night I found myself watching TV without specs for the first time since I was twelve. I was amazed at how much light there was in this new world, how much detail, how different colors and textures were. It was like an old-age miracle. No, it was an old-age miracle. A few months before, I’d been worried about whether I could pass the eye exam to renew my driver’s license. Now, I figured, I could pass a pilot’s license exam without glasses.

For twenty-four hours, I simply enjoyed being able to see. To see every detail. To see the tiny leaves on bushes and plants, to see the texture of the cloth of my shirt to see light and color the way I recalled them in my early childhood memories. The world was no longer a toned-down sepia place, but bright surroundings with a varied palette of amazing hues.

After more than six decades of a life in which the first thing I did in the morning was put my glasses on and the last thing I did at night was take them off, it was downright strange not to be wearing glasses. But good strange. By the next day, I was getting accustomed to having twenty-twenty vision and loving it. “Today we’ll go in the truck,” I told my wife, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Age 12 with my first specs

As soon as I was called into the surgeon’s consulting room, I shook his hand with both of mine and said, “Before anything else, Patricio, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this gift, this miracle that you’ve given me. I’ve worn glasses since I was twelve and before that, I had a lot of trouble in grade school because no one seemed to realize that I couldn’t see. It wasn’t until I got my first glasses that I saw, for the first time, what chalk actually looked like on a blackboard. So this, for me, is incredible, to be able to see, and see twenty-twenty, without glasses…well, you can’t imagine what it means to me, especially at seventy-something. So, thank you, it’s an invaluable gift.”

He was visibly moved. He checked the eye and pronounced it a total success.

I said, “How soon can I start reading and writing again?”

“Right now!” he said. “Let’s just check to see what prescription you’ll need for your readers.” He did a quick eye exam and gave me a prescription.

“But I want you to be able to work right now, so, you know these throw-away glasses they sell in Walmart or the pharmacy? Get yourself a pair of plus-twos until the optical shop finishes your prescription ones. Those should work just fine for you.”

First grade. That's me, clear at the back, just left
of Miss Long, the teacher. I would get bored, because 
I couldn't read the board or reading charts, so I talked to my
neighbors instead. Miss Long said I was "too talky" and 
seated me as far back as possible. Sitting at the back, I was 
basically blind to anything that went on up front.
Not exactly an auspicious start to grade school. 

He then told me to come back in a week. But then he asked me something else about Ohio, I asked him about Tucumán, then it was politics, then back to aerospace and Neil Armstrong, and just when I was about to leave, he asked how I ever came to live in Argentina…and that’s a long story.

Outside, my wife was getting worried because it was taking so long. She asked one of the staff, who have been in and out of the consulting room a few times since I’d arrived. “Oh, they’re all done with the eye exam,” she said, “they’re just in there chatting.” And gave Virginia a knowing look like, “This could take a while.”

This morning I was thinking, as Rubén Blades sings in Pedro Navaja,
La vida te da sorpresas
Sorpresas te da la vida, ¡ay, Dios!
Or in other words,
Life gives you surprises,
Surprises life gives you, oh Lord!

And you know, some days, you discover it’s not all downhill from here.