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I patch, and you patch, and they patch, so darling . . .

Matt cleaning the grill Down East mid July (left) -- prolly the first time any of our nuclear family grills was ever cleaned -- and his and Regan's new little love --  the yet-to-be-named flying bat girl --  sister to the best little girl in the world, Stella, who is about to be dethroned.

"You're a blogger?  What's that?" asked Jan, one of the wonderful nurses who prepped us for cataract surgery this morning at Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. We tried to explain but suspect it went in one ear and out the other of a woman who acknowledged "I don't even own a computer." But no matter. Her bedside mannner -- plus a good shot in the arm from an anesthesiologist of a "cocktail" mixture of feel-good drugs including some unnamed narcotics  -- put us in the perfect mood for cheerful banter:

Nurse Jan [with a gleem in her eye]: Are you afraid of us?
We: Oh . . . Are you Nurse Ratched in disguise?

A host of nurses and doctors made us feel like the most important person in the world for a few hours this morning as they prepped us for surgery, dropping various solutions in our bad eye -- the right one -- marking the brow above that eye with a grease pencil "R" to make sure the doc got the right one, and checking out our vital signs. At one point Nurse Jan asked whether we had someone who was standing by to take us home after surgery:

We: Yes, my husband, Tuck. He brought a good book along.

The way she phrased her question made us think of the classic wedding phrase, "And who gives this woman to be married to this man":

Nurse Jan: And will you say "I do" again?
We: I do, I do.

Once our eye was numb and incapable of movement, they wheeled us into the operating room, where the awesome young Dr. Matthew F. Gardiner -- pretty in blue -- performed the magic trick that is now considered routine in the ophthalmological world. From our point of view on the table it was no pain and all gain. We were conscious throughout, hearing the soothingly casual conversation of the medical team. All we could see was a beauty-in-unexpected-places light show of pinks and blues and purples as they removed -- under the microscope -- our old, cloudy lens through a tiny hole and replaced it with a shiny new articifical lens. Thank God -- and we do mean God, the Judeo-Christian one -- those British-born jihadis didn't get to perpetrate their nefarious plot of blowing up all those UK-to-US planes over the Atlantic on this, their appointed day. The horror of being under the knife while under enemy attack is beyond imagining.

Back home, we immediately resumed surfing the internet for blog material . . . Several thousand things in the works, but we wanted to get this one out first -- to reassure our treasured readers who have expressed concern -- that things are looking good. Happy as a clam at highwater but can't wait to be able to remove this annoying thing -- a combination of patch and shield -- from our right eye. Just want to tear it off our face, to be perfectly frank. A follow-up meeting with the doc tomorrow will provide more guidance. When we arrrived at MEEI mid morning, the place was filled with folks in full-eyepatch mode. It reminded us of some New Yorker cartoon from the old days of a subspecies of humanoids marching to a different drummer.

"I think it's adorable that Tuck is able to thread your needles."

Tiny meeps the English Ivy that grows unchecked up onto the western wall of the house next door. Not good for a shingled house to be covered by a rampant -- albeit beautiful -- vine. Moisture accumulates between plant and wall to the eventual deterioration of the wall. The house used to be owned and well maintained by our beloved ailurophilic neighbors Eddie and Rose, but they are long gone now, and no one seems to be looking after the place.

"You are reading like a 14 year old," Goomp's ophthalmologist told the Energizer-Bunny octogenarian -- and he wasn't referring to reading comprehension --  when our Papa went for a follow-up visit last year in connection with his cataract surgeries -- five years apart, starting ten years ago, on both eyes -- as he reports in comments to our previous post, "through a lens darkly."

Cats see things we don't, of course, and Tiny never disappoints.

"You will be happy with the results," comments blog friend Tara:

My father had the operation 5 years ago and he was thrilled with the results.

"Celebrate the fact that you can have this done relatively quickly here in America," adds the ever wise and witty Teresa:

Sometimes surgery is the better alternative. Especially since we don't want you going blind. :-)

More wit and wisdom from our imail correspondent this afternoon:

She: Did you go ahead and make an appointment?
We: No. Will wait till Monday.
She: I love how Dad is in the vanguard of "procedures." He's wicked brave, on that score.
We: Never do today what you can put off till Monday.
She: Is it really like looking through a glass darkly?
We: No. Like having a white cloud . . .
She: So, things look "milky"?
We: Yes. Good word. Try closing your eye part way . . . Like that.
She: I think it's adorable that Tuck is able to thread your needles, since, historically, he and David had the worst eyesight in the family.

We used to be so proud and superior in the God-given 20-20 vision of our youth. One of our all-time favorite things ever was to be the first one to spot a buoy predicted by the charts in real time on the horizon while under sail on our own bottom in the waters off the New England Coast. Fascinating to be the one in the family now with the worst vision of all. 'Specially with our having been gifted with the thing we often humorously refer to as a "good eye" for beauty in unexpected places. 'Guess we owe it to our fans to take care of the thing at the earliest opportunity.

Update:  Pam of Pamibe in the comments says "My Mom had it done in her 80s and was very pleased with the results, I know you will be too. :)"

Update II:  You will be very much pleased with the 118th Carnival of the Cats at Pets Garden Blog.

Through a lens darkly

Babe goes to the mattresses, where we will soon join him to refresh ourselves after a strenuous day of traveling by mass transit to Boston and back during heavy rains and thunderstorms and spending 3 out of 4 hours at Mass Eye and Ear waiting, waiting, waiting. As Tuck said, "Thank God your time isn't worth anything."

"You'll shoot your eye out," says the mom in "A Christmas Story," and now the wicked awesome doc at Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary informs us the cataract in our right eye is operable and attributable to one or more of the following:

Trauma
Diabetes
Steroids
The aging process.

As we told the old boy, Tuck stopped beating us years ago, we don't have diabetes, and we've never been on steroids. That leaves the aging process. The upside was the doctor's residential sidekick's calling us -- sort of -- "young" . . . Most cataract patients are 10-20 years older than we are, while some are 10-20 years younger . . . He recommended without pressuring us that we get the thing done now while we're still in good health. Gak. Goomp had his cataracts removed, one after the other in succession, about ten years ago and loved the results. The procedure costs $10,000, but for you, with insurance, it's a mere $1,000.

That's where we're at. It's the most successful and most performed operation in the nation, if not the universe, says Doc Matthew F. Gardiner of Mass Eye and Ear. He performs eye surgery every Wednesday and has the elegant hands of a surgeon. They make a small cut, remove the cloudy lens and then insert a new, improved artificial lens. 'Guess it's time to bite the bullet. We could be in a bed on the sixth floor at MEEI by mid August with local anesthesia and intravenous fluids. You go in early morning, have the thing done and then go home that afternoon with a patch over the offending eye and a follow-up appointment the next day. 'Hate the thought of it, but seeing through a glass darkly, as we have been through the right eye of late, is no picnic, especially for a visual artist like ourselves. As Goomp always says, getting old is not for the faint of heart. You could lose an eye, but the success rate is 95%.

This morning as we were preparing to resew a button on the little robin's-egg-blue linen blouse we intended to wear to our appointment, we had a horrifying We-R-JuJu moment. JuJu was our beloved Grammy, Mummy's mother who thought the sun rose and set on her little Sissikins up until we hit puberty. In her later years -- she lived to be 92 -- Grammy used to ask us to thread needles for her so she could mend this and that. Her eyesight was fading, so she couldn't see well enough to thread them herself. This morning we found ourselves unable to thread a needle to resew a button on that little linen blouse . . . 'Had to ask Tuck to do it for us. Sigh.

Do not go gentle

Richard Lawrence Cohen's Only What Is and Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids came by USPS today. Annie Gottlieb's A Return to Innocence (with Annie, by Jeffrey M. Schwartz) arrived last week. If only we were readers of the printed page. Being as we have recalcitrant vision issues, we much prefer the computer page. Trying to muddle through, but. In our salad days we were 20/20 and turned to cute little fashiony glasses in our middle years, but somewhere in there at the Design School at Harvard, a phantom-limb thing happened such that we could no longer wear glasses without unbearable facial pain. We turned to contacts, not by choice but by necessity. Now we wear one in the left eye and use the right eye for long-distance driving and such. Disagreeably, a cataract seems to be engulfing said right eye in the last year or two. As Goomp always says, old age is not for the faint of heart. And as Dylan Thomas wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There are some great laser operations out there at our local cutting-edge Mass Eye and Ear. Goomp himself has benefitted from that sort of thing in the last few years. It's probably about time for us to bite the bullet. But as Daniel Drezner wrote in another context yesterday, we all tend to "fall into the black hole of procrastination . . . It's nothing revolutionary, but it might help some to know they're not the only ones suffering from missed deadlines." We were particularly taken with his citations of Mary McKinney's "excellent essay 'Academic AWOL' for Inside Higher Ed":

1. Realize that your absence weighs heavier on your mind than the other person’s.

2. Remember, when you do get in touch, the person is unlikely to be angry and punitive.

3. Lower rather than raise your standards when you’re running late.

Guilt or shame? Only Dr. Sanity knows for sure, but in our book it's usually too close to call.