We're No Fakes

After my pre-op appointment today, the doctor told me to go to the pharmacy and pick up the eye drops he had ordered for me. I will be putting them in my eye starting on Sunday and continuing until the bottle is empty, about a week after the surgery.

We went downstairs and found the pharmacy and dutifully checked the board where they post the names of the patients whose prescriptions are ready to be picked up. My name wasn't there yet, but there was a B.Fakes. Well, people do weird things to our name and I wondered if the med tech had somehow typed in the wrong name or if someone in the pharmacy had typed in the wrong name.

They say that if your name hasn't appeared for 20 minutes, to go to the counter and ask. So we sat and waited. After 20 minutes there was still no "sykes" on the board, but B. Fakes was still there. I stood in line for another 5 minutes or so and finally got to a window where I said that my name wasn't there and I wondered if it had been mis-typed.

Well, no, it hadn't. But the doctor's office had phoned in the prescription yesterday, so it was there all along and my name would never have appeared on the board. Sigh.

Yes, the next time I see the doctor will be at surgery. I guess I'm more axious than I realize because my blood pressure when they first took it was 175/115, which is higher than it's ever been. It came down to closer to normal after about five minutes, but still higher than it should have been.

I will be so glad to get this over with. I asked the med tech what was the "worst possible scenario" and he said (which didn't surprise me) "blindness." Yes, I know that this is a simple surgery...but Gilbert died from a "simple surgery," so I wanted to know all the possibilities.

The first thing I asked was about bending over. I thought I had heard or read somewhere that I shouldn't be bending over. And yes, I was correct. I should not bend over from the waist for the first week, because of the rush of blood to the head after you stand up again being a potential for causing the stitches to tear. So I've had to ask Ashley to move Nicki and the puppies. I am thinking that it will probably be a permanent move for the puppies, but I'd be willing to take them back, if nobody wants to keep them. But I'm suspecting nobody is going to want to keep Nicki, and we'll take her back if that's the case.

The other thing is that when I saw him to schedule the surgery, he had told me I'd have an eye patch to wear at night after the surgery to prevent me from rubbing my eye, but it turns out he will have me wear the patch from after the surgery until my post-op the next day (and nighttime after that until stitches heal).

Now, for normal people this would be a minor inconvenience, but for me it's going to render me all but blind. The non-surgical eye is the one I don't use for vision. I can see out of it but 1/2 to 2/3 of the eye is covered by a cataract I can't see through at all. The portion of he eye that I CAN see with has vision that I can use to maneuver around the house, but I can't read with it, for example, so -- pay attention, Ron --

THERE WILL BE NO JOURNAL ENTRY FOR JANUARY 21

With luck, I will be back on line on the 22nd and I will have Walt put a note in the guestbook for January 20 to let people know how it all went. But unless things are different than I think they are going to be, use of the computer is going to be just about impossible for me while one eye is covered.

Besides, when I tell the story of How It Went, I want to be able to write it, not spend half my time squinting through a high powered magnifying lass to see a couple of letters out of one corner of my "bad" eye!