The Eyes Have It

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Went to the eye doctor today.  Not for new prescription glasses or any other potential benefit for my eyes but to get evidence of the severity of the retinitas pigmentosa as the next hoop to jump to qualify for state benefits so that I can have medicare so that I can have my prescriptions for blood pressure and mood disorder now numbering six and maybe stay alive and maybe sane.

And because they didn't schedule the field vision test for this appointment I have to go back again in two weeks for that to get the proof of what the eye doctor today estimated based on his visual observation of my retinas that I now have less than 5 degrees of vision. That's 5 out of the possible 180.

The state defines legal blindness as less than 20 degrees.  I was already at 12 to 15 the first time I went on disability in 1989 and the RP is by definition a degenerative disease and still no cure in sight.  So it would have taken a miracle of Gospel proportions to have changed that yet because I had the  good fortune to be able to go off the disability for over ten years I have to apply again as if I never did.

Do I sound bitter much?  Sorry but something about dealing with the system makes one feel less than.

The system looks at you with soulless eyes as if through a microscope at bacterium on a slide.  So one comes to feel a bit like a bacterium--a parasite needing to be exterminated.

Every time I go in to see my counselor I'm given a form to fill out to measure my subjective sense of my mood that day and one of the questions is: How often in the last two weeks have you felt you were a burden to family and friends?  never, sometimes, half the time, nearly every day, every day.  I always answer one of the last two even when for all the other questions I can answer one of the first two.

And I always silently add 'society' or 'community' to the list after 'family and friends'.

It doesn't help that as a political news junkie I'm tuned into the current debate in America over healthcare reform and that the overall mood of that debate paints taxpayer funded healthcare and other 'entitlements' as burdens on the hardworking Americans and is creating a sense that anyone needing help from the system is a 'user' or a 'taker' and that if the so called American Dream isn't working for you it can only be because you're too lazy to work for it and that the kindest thing we can do for people who can't or won't 'pay their own way' is eliminate all the 'entitlements' in order to force them to 'pull their own weight'.  But if you can't or won't 'pull your own weight' than have the decency to keep your weight off the backs of your fellow American Dreamers as you sink into the mud beneath their gold booted feet.

So.  OK.  The fact that question is on that 'mood-o-meter' questionnaire is testament to the fact that 'feeling like a burden' is a symptom of the illness and thus not necessarily a rational or objective view.

But it isn't necessarily irrational to interpret the mood of the nation that way and thus see yourself through the eyes of the Paul Ryans and Rand Pauls and the Tea Party protesters and the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters and Michelle Malkins... all those voices that are all but chanting for people like me to just lay down and die already.  Just get out of the way so the 'real' Americans can have the freedom to grab their bootstraps and bound up the ladder of success as weightless as frogs in space.

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Ch- ch- ch- changes. Gets Thee Behind Me.

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I'm always discombobulated by change. No amount of reasoning as to how it is inevitable serves to make me comfortable with it. Today I woke to discover my blog had been hacked and was redirecting visitors to a spam page offering the domain name for sale. While I was dealing with that Blogger via a popup asked if I was ready to switch over to the new platform.  I don't know why I clicked yes.  I was not in the mood for learning a new way to prepare my post.  But then when would I ever be?  I think I may have been feeling a minor surge of courage after figuring out how to fix the hack on my blog without running to Ed to rescue me.

Well there are several things I like about the new posting platform : 

• more buttons for coding--strike, undo, redo, jump break.
• more space in the editing fiels tho I could still wish for more.
• ability to change the size and position of photos after they are in place without going into the code
• ability to add labels by scrolling through a list of available ones and clicking on them.

And there are a few things I don't like so much:

• the font in the editing field used to be large enough for me to see without zooming and now it isn't.  A difference between size 14 and size 10
• which wouldn't be so bad if I could then use zoom but when I implemented zoom the right side of the editing field went behind the panel of commands in the right hand column and no horizontal scroll showed up..  I would prefer anyway if the whole page, editing field and command panel remained in same ratio and the horizontal scroll appeared for the whole page.  I'm used to that as I take advantage of zoom on many pages because of my vision impairment and am used to using horizontal scroll

I'm sure there are more I would put in both lists but I've had enough for tonight.  I need to take my change in small doses.

I've been talking here only of the editing platform itself.  I haven't even begun to explore the other new stuff on offer: the stats and analytics, settings and layout.  But that's gotta wait for another day.  Like I said.  Small doses.

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Arrrgg!!!

The results of the eye exam today were great and I was given the go ahead to order new lenses which we will do on Friday (payday) and best news of all: it should only take four working days before they are ready so I have an excellent chance of having them in time for Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon on the 24th.

When I sat down here after dinner and dishes I was pleased at the early start I was getting, at how ambitious and energetic I still felt even after the stress and energy expended today to get ready for and then go to my third post-op eye exam. I was planning to prepare a book review for one of the books I had finished and which had to go back to the library this morning. I'd spent last night's session taking notes on two of those books and know that if I'm going to prepare a review without the book beside me it had better be within the next 20-50 hours or so for the longer I wait the less reliable my memory will be.

I'd spent the hour of kitchen clean-up thinking about and composing sentences and paragraphs and outlines in my head. I was eager to proceed. I have too many barely begun book reviews in my files as is, sitting there waiting for me to re-order the books and when they wait too long the chances are I'll have to practically re-read the book. And they often wait and wait and wait because my library card is full to bursting most of the time with 40-60 items checked out and 20-40 lined up in my requests queues.

So I was motivated and eager and had the energy and my eyes weren't fatigued (partly because I hadn't already spent hours and hours reading because of the eye doctor appointment) so I opened a draft in Blogger. But then decided to first finish dealing with my email inbox which project had been interrupted when I was called to dinner. This involved opening a PDF file linked in one email. Which took endless minutes to open and then crashed the browser. After which I was sent to a Microsoft error report page which recommended I download the latest version of Adobe which had addressed the bug that caused the crash.

During the download I was informed that I needed to give Firefox permission to install add-ons from the Adobe site and that took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out how to do. And just as I got the website added to the permissions list the Adobe program proper alerted me that it had a download ready to install. I thought it was the same one I thought I'd begun from the Microsoft error report page but I'd not looked at the edition numbers closely enough as the download the Adobe program was asking to install was 8 point something while the one recommended by the error report was 9 point something but I didn't realize this until after clicking install.

So I waited patiently through the install of 8 point something, following its directions which included closing all open PDF files and all Adobe windows other than the download/install window which meant I had to close Firefox with all tabs including email, blogger post draft and several others relating to tasks I had lined up for this work session.

Then when the install was complete I was informed that there was another update available (9) and highly recommended so I started the download (over 40 MB) and waited patiently for it to complete and then install.

After the install I was informed that Adobe need to restart my system to complete the install. I do feel lucky that it at least asked first. Because that gave me a chance to close the other programs I had open properly. Especially WhizFolder which when not closed by its protocol will not remember which windows (files) were open and their positions on the desktop and when that happens it can take me up to 30 minutes to recreate my preferred arrangement.

And then there was iTunes which had a video podcast on pause which if I had not been able to mark it as new before closing the program might have been auto-deleted during the shutdown or reloading of the program.

Luckily I didn't have a Free Cell game in progress so I could just close that along with Live Messenger and the Onscreen Keyboard which I keep up sometimes for the convenience of being able to mouse keystrokes when editing or surfing or using keyboard shortcuts.

So. Once I had all programs closed properly I clicked 'restart' on the download dialog that I'd left sitting there and waited patiently through the shutdown and then waited patiently through the reloading of my desktop. And by the time I was free to open Whiz (where the notes for the reviews are stored) and the browser again I'd lost 90 minutes and all my oomph. I heard the echoes of a wailed 'Arrrggh!!!' in my head which reminded me of the picture I'd recently seen on art.com (click the pic to see its catalog page) and I decided to go with a flat out whine post for tonight.

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Well, I'll be Jiggered

Well, I'll be.

This picture was the perfect expression of how I'm feeling on day 2 post-op.

If you like it, you might like more of the offerings of My First Fail. A blog on the order of LOLcats featuring babies and small children.

Had the 24 hour post op exam at the eye-clinic this morning and results are beyond expectations. At my intake exam several weeks ago I could only read the third line on the chart with my right eye. Today I could read the fourth line on the second page! Without my glasses. And that is just the day after!! There is still blurriness and other distortion due to swelling etc. which is to be expected and why I have to wait four weeks before being fitted for lenses for close work.

Last night just before Ed went to bed I started staring at his shirt completely fascinated by something and my eyes kept going back when I tried to look elsewhere. I reminded myself of a baby who'd just discovered their hands and stare at them hypnotized. I finally figured out that it was because I was seeing the wrinkles in his T-shirt and the gape of his shirt pocket in 3D. For the first time in five years my eyes were coordinating to see in 3D. So I've been doing a lot of staring at things at the 6-10 foot range which is were the lens they put in my eye is set to focus.

Ed and his mom have both commented that I'm moving around better. With more confidence and less hesitation. I guess I just trotted out of the doctor's office today and headed for the car door and didn't need my MIL's elbow or even her warnings of or guidance around obstacles. I wasn't even aware I was doing that nor of any sense that it was abnormal and it should have felt odd since it had not been common for some time--years.

Then this evening Ed and I were sitting visiting on the front porch after dark and I was exclaiming over being able to see this and that in the light of the sodium vapor security lamp over the pool behind our yard that lights up portions of our yard near bright as day. I was describing things I was seeing that I'd not known were there or not seen in awhile and ed suggested I stand out on the end of the porch and look up at the sky and see if I could see any stars. I had to stare straight at the dark sky for over a minute before I started to see darker shapes against the dark that reminded me of trees and when I told Ed he directed me to look a tad up and to my right. I actually startled and said 'Whoa!' when this bright tiny light popped into view. I had found Venus! It was the only one I could spot even after another ten minutes of trying and not really a star but it is the first light in the sky besides the moon and landing jets that I've seen in years.

So I'm pretty pumped. I can't wait til I get my new prescription glasses so I can read and sew with my right eye again. The lenses they put in the eye to replace the lens damaged by cataracts are not able to multifocus like the normal eye so you end up with one distance for focus and need prescription lenses for the other distances--like close work. I have to wait at least a month though before they'll even issue a prescription as it takes that long for the eye to settle down to a new normal.

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So Far So Good

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Cataract surgery this morning went smooth and my only complaint tonight is it feels like I got a whisker in my eye. It's not pain per se. Just annoying and am constantly on edge resisting the urge to rub or poke it which I'm strictly forbidden to do. There's already great improvement especially for distances around six to ten feet. Though there is still some blurriness I got a hint of 3D when gazing at something about six feet away which indicates my two eyes are trying to coordinate already and haven't forgotten how even though its been at least five years since they could.

The right eye is not up to close work yet though--reading and sewing and computer work will be carried by my left eye for awhile longer. It will be so awesome when my right eye can start doing its share with those tasks again as my left is more compromised by the RP than the right and has less field of vision remaining with loss of vision (scattered blind spots) encroaching on the center and loss of color definition. It will be about a month before the vision in my right eye stabilizes enough to have a prescription lens ordered for it so I need to practice patience awhile longer. Am ecstatic to discover that color definition not only did not worsen but possibly improved in my right eye post op. That means I can continue to enjoy needlework with a full rainbow palette.

Meanwhile, on other fronts: Ed was sent home from work early today due to a power outage that was due to a power substation being damaged by one of the two major wildfires that were threatening residential areas in Meford and Ashland. We sit between the two and the smoke got pretty intense even here. But nothing like what Ed's mom had to contend with when she got off work in Ashland.

The power was off here for around two hours. I woke up to it having finally lain down to sleep about ten this morning. I'd been chilled for some reason so had put on a flannel shirt for the first time since June. I left the fans on though did turn down the one blowing directly on the bed. When I woke up at 3:30 it was to an over-quiet, over-warm, and stuffy room. My eyes and throat were dry to the point of significant discomfort. My laptop was operating on battery and was so low that it would have initiated hibernation within a couple of minutes if I hadn't done so immediately.

So. No light to read by. No TV. No boom box. No computer or internet. And no more of the happy juice they pumped into me this morning to make me not care so much. My inclination was to got back to sleep but it was past time to put in the next round of eye drops (3 kinds 4x a day) and past time for taking my bp meds which meant I'd need to eat something. So I got up. and without the usual distractions I fretted about the people, pets and wild animals affected by the two blazes and the smoke filling the valley and the firefighters on the planes and copters and on foot. About what if this and what if that.

I was disappointed when the power did not come back in time for the start of Oprah at 4 because it was to be all about the sixties with the set and people costumed and decorated to reflect the 1960s TV era. Major nostalgia kick as that was my pre-teen years and my first exposure to TV. When the power resumed about fifteen after four though Oprah was continually interrupted with breaking news from the fire fronts. Which I was actually more interested in in spite of how into this particular show I'd been. So that's one Oprah show I'll be looking forward to catching rerun season.

As if there hadn't been enough to deal with, Merlin got off his harness outside again this evening and was gone for about half an hour. Ed tried to chase him down but there was little point to it as it was dark and there are too many cars, bushes and porches for him to hide under. He came back of his own accord but then tried to take off again when he found us all on the porch blocking his way in to his dishes and litter box. The four of us corralled him down by the car in the driveway though I'm sure he could have evaded and taken off again if he'd truly wanted to. I'm sure he was wanting his food. But it wasn't until Ed and his folks had blocked his path on three of his possible escape routes and turned him in my direction that we managed to get him. He didn't so much as come to me as surrender when he saw me. Instead of darting in another direction like he had for each of them, he crouched down and waited for me to reach down and pick him up.

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The Eyes Have It

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Or rather have had it.

I was working on a book review for this post but have run out of time and my eyes are having a hissy fit.

Any other night I might just take a half hour break and come back to working the review but I have an ophthalmologist appointment in less than 12 hours (it's actually after 3AM Wednesday morning tho the date stamp reflects when I opened this post) so I can't push my lay down time much further let alone past dawn as I have been since I'm going to have to set my alarm for noon in order to get ready for it.

This appointment is primarily about having a look at the cataract on my right eye and then scheduling its removal. But I'm sure he will want to have a look at the current state of the RP damage to both eyes as well. This will be my first visit to an ophthalmologist in over eight years. Which is hardly recommended for someone dealing with a degenerative eye condition.

I don't know how realistic my hopes are but I'm hoping the surgery can be scheduled soon enough that I can have my new prescription glasses before NaNo starts November 1. Else participating in NaNo is going to be a huge frustration. I've barely been hanging on to a daily posting regimen here of late.

Reading with my right eye has become all but impossible and when I try anyway I pay a price in eyestrain, headaches and nausea.

I can read with my left but the RP damage is worse in it and limits me to reading a single short word at a time. Which feels very limiting to someone who once read whole lines at a glance. Getting this cataract removed will not bring back my heyday of 1000 wds per minute but it just might allow me to return to the fifty pages per hour I was still able to do five years ago before this cataract encroached on the center vision of my right eye and essentially cut my already limited field of vision in half or worse. Currently I'm averaging 20 pages an hour on a good day. But seldom can last out a full hour without a break.

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