I’m been struggling with my vision for a little while. A couple of years ago I got bifocals, but I couldn’t get used to them, couldn’t stand the “in between” place, which seemed always to be just where I was looking. Last summer I got reading glasses, and that was good. They are annoying, but I can see. About a month ago I realized that without my glasses I was seeing double, at least with my right eye. I made an appointment with the optometrist.
So yesterday was the day. I awoke with the beginnings of a migraine. Did all the little things I do to try to avoid a full-blown migraine, and was doing not too badly until that appointment. When you already have a pain, a pressure pushing on your eyeball, when the sunlight is already too bright, to have drops put into your eyes to open your irises, to have someone trying to hold your eyelid open — too much. No more avoiding the pain. Time to take the medication which will hold off most of it.
As my Mama has macular degeneration I am concerned about that. Thankfully, at this time there is no sign of that. But I did find out that the reason I’m seeing double can’t be fixed by any glasses — I have a cataract on my right eye. My dear Mama had one of those too, when she was 85!
Cataracts are caused by a clouding of the lens. The type I have starts around the outside edge and works its way in by ‘spokes.’ One of those spokes is going right across the centre of my eye, scattering the light that hits the lens so that I see double. The only cure is surgery — remove my defective lens and replace it with an artificial lens with the prescription to correct my eyesight in that eye (and my right eye has always been the weaker one). Bonus! And another bonus — I will now have one eye appointment a year covered by OHIP (as was this one, now that they found the cataract).
It may take months until it is done, but I am so looking forward to seeing better again!
