Skip to main content

Eye Stuff

My wife had eye surgery this past Wednesday.  She had had some obscuring of her vision in the one eye; her optometrist (and my sister-in-law, who is also an optometrist) listed a bunch of possible causes which either would heal on their own or require retinal surgery. As of Tuesday it became clear (to the optometrist) that she was developing a small tear in her retina. 

This matches the definition of urgent:  something where delay makes things significantly worse. She was immediately sent to an retinal specialist who set her up for surgery the next day to mend the tear while it was minor.

I went with her which involved a lot of waiting with us being in different rooms in the same building. The surgery took about an hour; I still struggle with the idea of eye surgery being routine but they've been doing it for a while. Modern medicine being what it is they gave her an hour to recover from the anesthesia and sent her home with me. The surgeon thought that all went well and concurred with himself the next day when removing her bandages to check out the eye.

Our daughter lives nearby and has been tending to my wife while I started teaching classes Thursday and Friday immediately afterward. She is a big help, always has been. My wife is an avid reader and not being able to read at first was unsettling for her. By today (Saturday) she is reading pretty well with the one eye. The repaired eye should be mostly back to normal in 1-2 weeks.

My vision has degraded with age but leveled off when I turned 50. I've always been keenly aware of how much my life as a math instructor has depended on my eyesight, from the beginning of my career in my 20's. Strangely enough my hearing has stayed quite good; when I start to lose that it will be hard since music (making and listening) has been part of my life since I started playing in my school band in third grade.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more