21ST CENTURY LUCKY

So I had an eye operation yesterday, a very common one where they make an incision, suck out the cataract that's been clouding my vision and making it close to impossible to drive at night and put in a pupil size lens to make my non-cataract vision more clear.

One of my grandmothers had cataracts as I remember it and what that meant in those days was stumbling around as your eyesight got worse and worse. How fortunate I am to be alive today where this kind of operation is routine.

Just came back from the doc removing the plastic bubble that I will be wearing over the eye only when sleeping now—and that my fifteen-year-old called "bug eye"—and replacing the giant black plastic glasses they gave me yesterday with Bono-like wrap-around safety "glasses" that I'll wear during the day for another week.

Except for not supposed to cough, sneeze, bend, lift, strain or in any other way create pressure that might cause the incision to open or something like that, everything's pretty normal except that now I can see pretty well in my right eye, at least for distance, the way I could most of my life.

There's always good and bad in the world and in a day, routine cataract surgery is one of the good.

[PS: Thanks to great friends helping out with rides (Jeff, Bill) and more, and to my sons who have been taking good care of me, my older son Miles drove down from The Berkshires to spend a few days and nights looking out for me, and my fifteen-year-old, Flynn, made me lunch and keeps catching me when I start to bend (first thing I did after the operation was bend over to pick something up from the floor for which the nurse reprimanded me). Try not bending for a day, amazing how many times at least this human does.]