The week between surgeries

If you are too nearsighted to be able to read comfortably without glasses, plan very carefully the timing of the week between surgeries. I am finding it quite difficult to function. It might be a little easier if I were wearing my glasses and using the eye that has not yet had surgery. But my glasses broke so I am using the eye that had surgery and cheap reading glasses. In either case, there is no avoiding the vision of one eye being totally blurry. This is a particular problem for driving at night because every bright light has a big blur around it. If you need to do significant driving at night, get an eye patch beforehand.

The adjustment to using glasses for closeup is such a reversal of all my habits, and it is harder to make that adjustment when the vision from one eye is completely blurry at the same time.  Yet it seems like a good thing to use the eye with the new lens, to have brain and vision settling in together right away.

Cooking turns out to particularly be something that requires working at a variety of distances.  But I'm glad not to be working.  I don't have much feeling that my body is recovering from trauma, but it does feel right to take it a little easy.  And doing a lot of reading either on a screen or from papers would be hard.  Christmas is nice because I can enjoy sitting around with my family, and I have my daughter to help with the cooking.

One of the improvements in the corrected eye is a greater sense of depth, the world is less flat.  But I am using only one eye and therefore lacking binocular depth perception.  Add to that that reading glasses make things appear a lot closer--it seems as if my arms have gotten shorter.  Pouring things was hit and miss at first.  Because I used progressive bifocals, I also had gotten used to odd information about the lower part of my field of vision.  No longer wearing glasses, I have missed stairs several times because of that and one time actually fell (luckily going up my front steps).

Posts in this series (reverse chronological order):
Eye Surgery Follow-up
Brain Adjustment
Second Vision Correction Surgery
The Week Between Surgeries
Day after Surgery
First Surgery
Refractive Lens Exchange