You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

I mean, it’s like learning how to fold a fitted sheet. I can't make a fitted sheet look neat even though lately there have been all kinds of helpful videos showing how to do it. It is too late for me to learn. I tend to read a lot of recipes and kitchen hints, as opposed to actually cooking, and although I now know I am supposed to crack a hard boiled egg at the sharp end (or is it the rounded end?) in order to peel it neatly, and that cutting the stem (non-stem?) end of a cucumber gives you bitter slices, I have been peeling eggs and slicing cucumbers with a reasonable amount of success for over sixty years without needing to know such esoterica.

This leads me to my eyes. The two cataract surgeries were clinically a great success. I can now drive or sit and watch television all evening without any glasses, I can now, with the aid of reading glasses, sit all day with a book and see all the words. I replaced the cheap reading glasses with ones that enable me to see the computer screen also, so I should be OK, right? Wrong. No-one just sits and watches TV—I am always reading or checking documents or using my hands at the same time. This means taking the glasses hanging round my neck and constantly putting them on or removing them. Frequently I forget to remove them and gaze fuzzily into the distance and think the surgery has come unglued. No-one reads for any period of time without occasionally looking up at people or staring out the window. Eating is weird: my food is too far to use the readers but too near to be able to use my new eyes. (I have even been known to spill soup on my dangling glasses.) Anyone who has tried this will know what I mean.

It is not just my eyes that misbehave. My arms automatically reach out to the bedside table to grab the glasses without which my brain still tells me I won’t be able to see when I get out of bed. It is like phantom pain from an amputated limb. After sixty odd years of wearing glasses they have become a source of comfort.

I started to explain all this to my surgeon when I went back for a check-up.  He immediately whipped off his glasses and put them on me. Eureka. He wears progressive lenses with plain glass at the top. As soon as my eyes heal he will give me a prescription for new glasses with the same properties and I will joyfully revert to wearing glasses. Basically progressive reading glasses. As he smilingly said, “Very expensive reading glasses."