Ugh.

Shortly after I put together my last, lengthy post, I found out my cousin Brad died. He was a few years younger than me, and had been fighting a nasty cancer with courage and toughness, but he finally succumbed. We weren’t close, really, but he was a good guy, and the world’s a lesser place without him in it.

Off to the funeral. Lord, I loathe funerals. It’ll be a wake for this ‘un when the time comes. Loud music and free beer. And no crying allowed.

The Prodigal Am Back

So it’s been a while. Sue me.
My goal around the time of the Great Transplant was to have this thing up and roaring by Thanksgiving.
Right.
Well, then Christmas, surely.
Uh-huh.
New Year’s Day? The inauguration? Groundhog Day? Valentine’s Day? President’s Day?
As if.
So what’s been happening? Well, revisions have been happening, on a couple of novels. Lots and lots of revisions. And recovering from the transplant. I was told to expect it to go slowly, and it has, but steadily.
I will admit that I was more than a tad nervous about the transplant, though I hasten to add this was due in no part to my confidence in my surgeon. I had the procedure done at Dean McGee here in Oklahoma City, and I was assured beforehand by the medicos I know that the folks at Dean McGee know what they’re doing. But no matter how you slice it (ouch!) you’re talking about an organ transplant. What’s not to suffer a little trepidation about?
The presurgical consultations went well, although My Bad Eye wrecked the crap out of this hypnotic optical imaging machine (that used a zip drive, of all things. A zip drive?) I was amazed by how routine all of this seemed to be. I went, the doc took a look at things, and tried to gently ease me into the horrible reality of a corneal transplant.
“Well,” he said, “There are a few treatment options.”
Options? Screw options, I want a new peeper!
“Uh,” I said, which I think he misinterpreted as dread at the realization that the T word was coming.
“We can try going without contacts at all for a few months to see if that helps some of the irritation . . .”
Folks, I am so blind as to make bats look like the kings of visual acuity with correction of some sort.
“Well,” I said.
“Or we can try to piggyback gas perms on top of soft lenses . . .”
“Oh no. That didn’t work at all.”
“There’s something called Intacts . . .”
“Don’t they kind of suck?”
“Well,” he said, not wanting to stoop to my vernacular.”
“I’ve read about them,” I said, striving for erudition (this is almost always a mistake for me.)
“Right. Well, really, I’m thinking we need to do a transplant.”
I refrained, dear reader, from dancing a jig. I felt it humane, as no one should have to see that.
So we set the date, the day before Halloween, and that was that.

So I showed up for the big day a little nervous, but mostly anxious to get it going. They put me in a nice gown and gave me these nifty non-skid socks and got the iv going. Any fretting I had done was wasted, as the iv was the most painful part of the day, although it had competition from a toe stubbing earlier that morning. The anesthesiologist came in and we had a pleasant visit. He told me what drugs they would give me (I forgot immediately what they were, but friends, they were good.) and how they would work. He said, “We’ll keep you mostly awake for this, because it makes the recovery easier. We don’t want you to have to wait around, we want you to get out of here and go get a burger. When we go in to shoot you up with the local, I’ll put you to sleep, and when we’re done, I’ll bring you back. I tell you this now, and I’ll tell you again right before we do it, because if I don’t, you might not believe we’ve done it, and you might stress. We don’t want stress.”
Which, by the way, is my motto.
They wheeled me into the operating room and wrapped me in a nice warm blanket (I felt like a great big red-headed burrito) and situated my head and got me the way they wanted me and then . . .
Well, I went to sleep. What the hell, I was comfortable. I’d really meant to stay awake and ask insightful, intelligent questions that would demonstrate how much I’d read up on this. Instead, I probably snored. I came around and the docs were chatting away.
“Oh,” one masked face said, “How’re you doing?”
“Shiny,” I said. I doubt the Firefly reference found a landing spot.
“Well,” the other masked face said, “We’ve started sewing you up.”
What? I missed all the fun?
I had. We talked about my right eye while they finished stitching up my eyeball, I mentioned that a great big cheeseburger seemed like the ticket, and a consensus was reached. They rolled me out, and I don’t know about those guys, but my cheeseburger that afternoon was quite fine.

Since then it’s been eyedrops and checkups, eyedrops and checkups. I felt very little pain post-op, and the light sensitivity wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it would be. I was up and about the night of, and I think I took exactly one pain pill. The eye shield took getting used to, particularly when trying to situate my cpap mask. With the eye shield and mask, I looked totally alien, much to the amusement of the rest of the Wolf clan, even the dogs.
By the day after, Halloween, I was feeling chipper enough to watch X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY eyes, which I’d never seen and rather enjoyed (Ray Milland turned in a nice performance, I thought) and then I was scaring the shit out of trick-or-treaters with my eye shield and bruises and tousled hair.
Since then it’s been eyedrops and checkups, eyedrops and checkups. Not that I’m complaining. My vision has gradually improved, and did so markedly after the doctor took a couple of stitches out in January. (Strangely, that was the hardest part of this: holding still while tweezers come straight at your eyeball is harder than it sounds.) At night, when I read in bed, I generally read favoring the left eye now. There are several more follow-ups ahead, during which I expect more stitches will come out. By the fall, I should be able to get vision correction of some kind, and then we turn our attention to the right eye, which may well be a candidate for a relatively new treatment called Corneal Collagen Cross-linking with Riboflavin, or C3R. It sounds incredible, and if it’s available, I’m in like Flynn.
I was able to walk on a treadmill for a couple of miles two days after the procedure and resume my normal workout (stairmaster, weights, the usual nonsense) by early January. The one thing I’m not supposed to do is squat and strain to lift something very heavy. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.
Which means, of course, writing.
And ideas.
That’s what I want to talk about next, since that’s what so many non-writers ask me. Where do you get all your ideas? Folks, that isn’t the problem. Trust me that isn’t the problem.
What I hope to do with this blog is have some chatty, informal stuff 6 days a week, give or take, and then something a little more substantial, a mini-essay, on Sundays. Call it the sermon, if you like. For what it’s worth. So maybe the ideas will get knocked about on Sunday, for the two crickets out there chirping.
Till then, behave.
CW

Hello Cruel World

Just what the world needs.   Another blog.   Yeah, I know.   Worse, another blog by some blowhard writer–a fictioneer, no less–spouting on at length about what was et for breakfast, or how many pointless words were pounded out today, no doubt with a meter at the bottom to illustrate.

Well, not quite.  Not exactly.

First, let me introduce myself.   I’m Craig Wolf, and I write odd and usually dark fiction.  Not because I’m a particularly dark or odd person, although i can be.  It’s just how my stories skew.  What the hell, you go with what you got.  I’ve published two books at this writing–a short story collection called Pressure Points and a really nasty short novel called Trespass.  Amazon’s got ‘em, as do a few other joints around.  I’ve also published a couple dozen short stories in the small press, finished two more novels, and in a few months will embark on a big fat novel about genocide that I should have my head examined for even dreaming of writing.

So I’m writer in the small press dreaming of leaping to the big pond, so what?  Why another blog?  Just to hype myself?

Well, sometimes, sure.  And sometimes I will talk about writing and politics and whatever the hell.   As some poet said, and maybe I paraphrase, “I’m fat, I got room.”

But you may have caught the phrase ‘in a few months’ above.   I do intend to start the Big Damn Genocide Book in due course.  In the meantime, however, I get to have a corneal transplant.  Thus the blog.

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a charming eye disease called keratoconus.   This is a disease wherein the cornea thins and bulges, resulting in halos, monocular double-vision, and light sensitivity.  And discomfort.  Lots of it.   My eye doc told me that people with keratoconus develope a fairly high threshold for eye pain, and that by the time we tend to report contact lens discomfort, a fair amount of damage has been done.

According to kcresources.com, keratoconus affects, at most, about 600 people per 100,000.   In something like 80% of all keratoconus cases, the disease progresses so far and then stops.

I’m one of  the 20% where it doesn’t. 

We’ve tried different iterations of rigid gas permeable lenses, gas perms piggybacked on soft lenses, and finally, scleral lenses.   All to no avail.   The rgp’s, which I’d worn for years (and which may have contributed to severity of my condition) were quickly proven to be untenable.   No matter how custom shaped they were, my eyes lost tolerance for them in fairly short order.   The piggy back method felt okay, and the vision was acceptable, but there were problems with the breathability of the setup.  Certain blood vessels weren’t getting with the program.  The scleral lenses worked for a while, then the lens intolerance kicked in.   Right now, I have my good days and my bad days (bad being defined as I can’t wear the damned things at all, and thus am left blind as a bat and unable to do much of anything).

Not to get all whiney, but as a reader, this sucks.   Over the last two years I’ve gone from reading 2-3 books a week to 2-3 books a month.   (Lately, those have been limited to what I can find in large print; my local library does a steady business in large print Fern Michaels novels, but as yet I’ve not been forced down that road.)  As a writer, it’s been little better.   By blowing the font up to insane sizes, I can still work, but fatigue and strain set in pretty quickly. 

In 22 days, that will become . . . different.

On October 30, one day before my favorite holiday, I will receive a donated cornea.

It has been of much use to me to read online the progress of others who have gone down this path, and at least for now, that’s the primary purpose of this blog.  I’m one of those people who live for detours, though, so those should be expected.   Hell, relished.

Anyway, that’s it for a starter.   Next, I’ll probably chat about my initial consultation with my surgeon, in whom I have utmost confidence, but for now, well, the peepers is pooped.