Spoke with my mom last night to get news on my dad. Turns out they had spent the whole previous day back at the laser specialist with no good news to report. The retina in my dad’s right eye is torn and is effectively half-blind in that eye. Laser surgery could be done but nothing guarantees it’ll do anything. He’s now on Vitalux and will have to be for the rest of his life. This should give him the appropriate vitamins to prevent the same trouble attacking his left eye. He has to go back next week to see what they can do to stop the spread of the damage to the right eye.
Basically, if he were to cover his left eye and look at you with his right, he would only be able to see you from the chest down. That’s his field of vision. I can only imagine how much more strain this will put on his left eye. Add those daily vitamins to the daily pills he takes for his thyroid and I begin to see how it is that we start our lives crying and looking for warmth and nourishment, to ending it spending what seems like hours every day ingesting man-made products, chemicals, etc. The older you get, the more pills you have to take. Kind of makes me think long and hard about how I want to live my life when I’m old, worn-down, and broken.
It hurts to know how he’s feeling and what he’s got to cope with… but at least he can still see and will be able to see his new grandson next month. I don’t know how we would have been able to handle the alternative…
As for myself… I still don’t want to talk about it. Although I got the all-clear signal, the test I went through was the most violating, painful, and emotionally shattering thing I have ever experienced in my physical life. A 2 minute test that had me blubbering in pain and shock, locked in the bathroom for 20 minutes at the hospital before I was able to go home… to lock myself away again and spend several hours in complete agony. I couldn’t believe the documentation they gave me ahead of time casually stated that I could “return to work without difficulty” afterwards. Barbarians.