Cataracts, Day Three

      Yesterday, the eye doctor did my right eye.  They load you up with Versed, which starts erasing memories as it wears off.  So about all I can really recall about the surgery itself is that the nurses and eye surgeon were nice, and the entire process was smooth, professional and felt unhurried.

     That last thing is no small accomplishment.  It's essentially a production line; patients are tightly scheduled and their process of evaluation, preparation, surgery intake, surgery and recovery shows every sign of careful time-motion analysis -- but analysis by an actual eye surgeon, someone who knows how long things ought to take, and why you ought to add ten or twenty percent extra time.  As a result, waiting rooms aren't crowded, patients don't spend a lot of time in them (and the longest waits are after you've been given dilating eye drops and they're taking effect) and everything just keeps moving.  (In fact, the firm is owned by an eye surgeon.)

     As a (almost certainly intentional) side effect, it's as good a cure for worry as can be had: everyone you deal with is relaxed.  They're not fighting the clock; they know patients will arrive and move though the system in good order.  That level of confidence comes though clearly to the patent, or at least it did to me.  Every single person you interact with begins with a name/birthdate check, and the same eye surgeon who does your pre-operative check (and pen-marks your face next to the eye they're working on*) does your eye surgery.  It appears they run in batches of five or six (or more), with at least that many prep positions outside dual operating rooms.  There are a pair of nurses per patient (and possibly pair of positions), timed so that nobody's hanging around waiting and nobody's trying to juggle more work than they can manage.

     This is a profitable specialty, and one that is highly reputation-driven.  The two factors appear to have resulted, for this practice, in a remarkably well-run end result.

     As for me, I am now less nearsighted.  My vision is still sorting itself out and I'm definitely going to need new glasses, but I think it'll be workable.

     I had been skeptical of the people telling me about yellowing vision and all the depth of color I would see afterward.  Surely not me -- I was seeing colors just fine!   Um, about that?  You were right.  I had no idea.  Whites are brighter, colors are deeper, shadows less impenetrable. Gas flames are a shade of purplish-blue that I don't think I have ever seen before!  I'm going to need stronger sunglasses for outdoors, too.  Why, we haven't had summer sun like this since I was a teenager (or so it has seemed).
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* I'm told that the simple step of marking the area to be operated on, universally adopted over the last 30 years or so, has made a huge difference in "Oops, not that side" surgical mistakes.  Yes, in hindsight it seems like a no-brainer, but it hadn't been SOP and by the time someone's all prepped and draped in the OR, who and where is not always obvious.  Ditto the practice of always verifying which patient you are in every interaction -- it might be annoying, but it's enormously helpful in making sure you don't get the treatment intended for someone else, or vice versa.