Reading and myopia

Tomorrow my half-sister has surgery to close the same macular hole for the third time.  The process of recovery involves staying face down 24 hours a day for as long as six weeks, which makes recovering from cataract surgery look like a trip to the park.

I’ve discovered recently that as we get older, blindness among all of us in the developed world is increasing at a surprising rate.  When I was trying to find Snead’s qualifications several months ago, I googled an article that found only 25% of the people in the UK who have myopic vision (that is, who are short- or near-sighted) were carrying a gene connected with myopia.  I was astonished because I’d grown up with the idea that almost all short-sightedness was inherited.  But it looks as if a great deal of our vision is affected by environmental factors.  What are they?

Mostly it seems to be close work.  There are many many more near-sighted people in developed countries or in pockets where people are highly educated than in the undeveloped world, even when the genetic pool is the same.  It looks as if our eyes have evolved for seeing things in a distance.  Writing was only invented some 7,000 years ago, and then only a very small number of people could read and write.  Widespread literacy still isn’t universal, and the personal computer is barely a quarter of a century old.  We haven’t had much of a chance to adapt to these new visual demands.

Reading and writing, computers and television might be principle factors in modern life that are ruining our eyesight.  The old idea that it’s intellectuals who wear glasses doesn’t seem as crazy as it sounds.   

Clowns walking backwards

Native American tribes have a figure called a Sacred Clown.  The clown is to their communities what comedians often are for us.  They make us laugh at ourselves, our pomposity and arrogance.  They mimic, they exaggerate, they sometimes help us realize the hypocrisy of what we’re saying by saying the exactly the opposite.  Clowns in sacred ceremonies sometimes walk backwards – just to remind us that we should never take even the most serious things too too seriously because we just might have got it all backwards.

Being half German, I usually take myself and the world with dead seriousness.  So I really need clowns in my life, and people who can make me laugh.

A self-destructive strategy

For more than a year when Peter and I have walked to the local shop, we have often passed a man walking alone.  We greet each other, but no more.  Even as an American who is frequently unsure whether my particular form of polite greeting may be perceived as intrusive, I am careful not to slow my walk as we pass, for fear of threatening the possibility of actually having a conversion.  His expression makes it clear that to so much as a comment about the weather would be unwelcome.

This morning as Peter and I walked to pick up the newspaper as usual, we saw him on the sidewalk ahead accompanying a woman in a wheel chair.  As we passed, I greeted them in the usual way.  The woman returned the greeting with a smile of long-suffering martyrdom, of someone who has been asked to bear an unfair burden that she resents but probably feels she is carrying with stoic heroism.  Rightly or wrongly, I thought almost at once that I now understood the self-contained independence of the man who is presumably her husband.  My guess was that he is burdened with a complaining wife whom he in turn resents but who is determined not to mirror her grievance.

I know nothing about this couple and my hypothesis may be completely wrong.  I do hope, though, that I will never face my own life resenting the cards I have been dealt.  Even if I can never read again after my cataract surgery next Wednesday, I am determined not to be sorry for myself.  Life is too exciting, too wonderful a gift.  Still, I am aware that I am an immensely fortunate person.  I have never been tested by an event that seemed unbearable or a disappointment that could not be healed.  I have never had to bear the loss of a child, worry about where my next meal is coming from, endure unstoppable pain, an abusive husband, or most horrors that cross our television screens and papers every day. 

Weed-free Worry

Cathy phoned last night with the news that she got an all clear on her MRI.  And I have entered a period of calmness about my eye surgery next Wednesday.  It’s fortuitous because it is too cold today to work in the garden much.  I discovered that I’ve been tending what has turned out to be a cheeky weed for the last year, and consigned a Scottish thistle to another life in the compost.  Appearances do deceive. 

Anyway, I often prefer cleaning and inside projects to gardening to work through my worries.  Today is one of those luxurious “miscellaneous jobs” days.

Gardening as a duty

I spent a good three hours in the garden today digging out weeds and pulling out miles of invasive ivy that’s crawled over the fence for years from the neighbors’ side.

Actually, I don’t like gardening all that much.  I realize for many people, working in the garden is an almost mystical exercise, and not to revel in it is a mere one step up from hating children.  I’m doing it though, because it needs doing and it does help me exorcise my anxieties.

To my surprise, I am finding that yoga gives me more energy and relieves my aches and anxieties better than any other activity I know except possibly swimming.  It may help even more than any vitamin supplement as well, though I’m not planning on trying to test that hypothesis too rigorously.

Big Dollop of Hope

Today opened with two bits of seriously encouraging news.  The preview report to my sister C is encouraging.  Not final yet, but the situation looks rather better than worse.  The second is a total surprise.  A woman who had eye surgery with MP Snead last August sent a comment on this blog saying that if anyone can help me, it is this man, who is brilliant, considerate, and amazing.  It is a confirmation of the conclusion I too had reached after my initial consultation with him.  But I have not yet anything but a hunch to back me up.  Lizz says her surgery for a mucular hole was a success.  So I’m pretty sure he’s not just sticking needles in people’s eyes and striking it lucky.

I do feel now if it is my fate to lose my vision so I can’t read, I can live with it.  Not like it one little bit, but eventually come to terms with it.  What I couldn’t bear was that the operation would fail because it had been bungled by an incompetent surgeon.

Who would have thought that a five-sentence comment posted by someone I don’t even know could be so strengthening.  My own surgery is a week today. 

Diagnostics

I went to the hospital eye center yesterday for the tests and measurements that have to be done in preparation for cataract surgery.  The staff is unusually willing to take time to discuss the tests, and we talked about research exploring the relationship between learning difficulties and the kind of eye problems I have had all my life and that plague so many children.

If I were still employed by a university, I would find an optician and suggest we apply for a grant to study the relationship between spatial and reading skills and vision problems.  With the specialized knowledge of an optician, and the specialized knowledge I have as a cognitive psychologist, it would be possible to do much more detailed research than has been done by optomitrists’ treatment centers thus far.

My worry about whether I am going to be able to read after surgery has been displaced by worry about my sister C who had follow-up tests yesterday to clarify some dodgy shadows on her mammogram.  I spent most of today furiously gardening trying to keep my worry under some reasonable control.  The medical world offers so many possibilities and so much hope, but it also brings a new kind of anxiety and trauma that even our grandparents didn’t have.  It’s when modern medicine says “no, there’s nothing more we can do” that the true terror has to be confronted. 

Different perspective on my worries

My sister C. is having another test following her mammography last week.  She is worried, because we have a very heavy genetic background of cancer in our family, including two other sisters with breast cancer, one of whom died.  My mother died of colon cancer at 49, leaving ten children between the ages of 6 and 20.  I was 19, and as the oldest sister had a special relationship with C whom I loved most especially – her unique sense of humor, her intelligence, her vulnerability. 

I almost broke down in tears yesterday thinking about the possibility of her having cancer.  It puts my worries about cataract surgery in a different perspective.  I’m having pre-surgery diagnostic tests tomorrow, but I’m much more worried about C’s diagnosis than mine right now.

Do we need guns?

I have watched with horror the tragedy of the murders at Virginia Tech.  32 shot dead in their classrooms and as many injured.  Here in England, the coverage in all the media is no less than I suspect it is in the States.  But few people can understand the American love affair with the gun.

I was stalked once by a student who came and sat on the stairs of my apartment building for hours.  I wasn’t afraid that anybody was carrying a knife or gun.  These days I think I might not be so sanguine. 

I doubt this shooting will have any effect on gun legislation in the States, though.  And I’m not convinced that outlawing the carrying of some guns is desirable even if it were possible.  Yet I do wonder if it is really necessary to defend the rights of all US citizens to carry AKA rifles and other weapons designed specifically for war? 

On the other hand, during the foot-and-mouth crisis over here when the military was called in by authorities in London to help slaughter millions of sheep, I knew that kind of thing could never happen in the States.  Farmers would have met the military at the farm gates with their own weapons rather than let them in with the law-abiding anguish they did over here.   

And I don’t like the idea of the military being the only people in a society that have legitimate access to guns.  Governments simply can’t be trusted over the long-term to be given that kind of unassailed power.

 

Cheerful News

A friend just sent me an email saying the optician told her she has cataracts, but if she has surgery to remove them it might fail, in which case things will be even worse than they are now.  Meanwhile, Mary Jean is going in May 1st for surgery for a macular hole that’s opened up for a third time.

I read today that blindness is a growing phenomenon among the elderly in the developed world.

Well, I can only think that if cataract surgery doesn’t work for me, at least I won’t say I never thought it could happen to me.  But I hope desperately it doesn’t.