Fear

Medical advancements can be divided into two separate but overlapping categories: those that improve the quality of life and those that extend the quantity, or length, of life. IOLs, Intra-Ocular Lens implants fall clearly in the former. After installation they function like the originals with no needed care or anti-rejection drugs or anything. They truly improve the quality of life with virtually no negatives at all for most people. And they haven’t been around for very long. Someone born just 50 years prior to me would’ve been largely out of luck. Other than increasingly powerful correction with decreasing results, they would have slowly lost this incredibly important human sense. Adaptation was the only remedy.

Here’s an unfortunate fact. I’m not very strong when it comes to medical procedures of almost any kind. I’ve passed out from blood draws and other needle sticks. Donating blood is a worthy cause that I’ve done, but a few times the ordeal ended with me on the floor... even after getting my cookie and orange juice. Putting eye drops in has required a team of people. Eye clinics have rarely had patients that needed so many hands to hold open the eye lids for the dreaded glaucoma test. Contact lenses were not even a consideration when I needed glasses. So, the idea of surgery on my eye was simply off-the-chart. Fear, even baseless fear, is a powerful force.

But the prospect of going blind is an even more powerful force. A force that’ll make even the weak strong. And, over time, I came to accept, even look forward to, the idea that someone would be sticking a hot poker into my eye, shattering and sucking out the old lens, and sliding a new plastic replacement in through the hole made by the hot poker. And all this, mind you, while I’m awake? Really?