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
