Was blind but now I see

I really hate not being able to see.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am totally scared of the dark, most likely for that reason. It’s not the DARK I’m afraid of, per se. It’s what I CAN’T SEE in the dark that scares me.

When Caroline was just a few months old, I had LASIK on my eyes because I was afraid of what might happen if there was an emergency in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get to my glasses or contacts. I was 20/1600 before the procedure, so functioning without some kind of help was impossible.

The LASIK worked and I did just fine for quite some time.

Until I didn’t.

For some reason, my eyes decided to not work together anymore about five years ago and I developed double vision. My eyesight deteriorated rapidly (nobody knows why) and I quickly reached the point where glasses would no longer be enough.

Surgery.

Unlike my two burn surgeries back in January, this one was planned and expected. And THANKS to the burn surgeries back in January, I had already met my deductible and as Joey says on Friends, “I can have all the free surgeries I want!” (Not exactly, but it helps.)

Of course the doctor had to run through all the worst-case scenarios. The one that stuck in my brain was, “If your eyes get infected after surgery, you could lose your sight.”

He went on to say how highly unlikely that was and he had done the surgery hundreds of times and that had never happened, but I didn’t hear much of it.

All I could think about was the Grand Canyon and how beautiful it was.

What if I never got to see what my kids looked like as adults?

I hadn’t seen Scotland, Ireland or Alaska yet.

What if I couldn’t READ anymore?

I thought about getting a hundred other ‘second opinions,’ but the surgery was going to have to happen at some point. And the longer I waited, the weaker my eye muscles.

I’m thankful to report that the surgery went beautifully. The doctor said it was absolutely textbook and he did not expect to have to go back in to make any adjustments. Four days out and I can see with my new prescription in my glasses, better than I’ve been able to see in YEARS.

My eyes don’t feel GREAT. But they work. And I’ve uncovered some superpowers that I didn’t realize that I had:

1. I can do an excellent impression of someone who is NOT on Percocet, in short spurts.
2. The ridiculously high threshold for pain that allowed me to sustain a third-degree burn without pulling away does NOT apply to my eyes. Pain meds take the edge off, but certainly don’t make it go away. Youch.
3. I can take a shower with my eyes closed.
4. I like listening to books on tape.
5. Any weight I lose in a 2-3 week period I can, um, FIND again in 2-3 DAYS.

I also have a whole new respect for the phrase, “Perception is reality.”

I knew that what I saw wasn’t what was real or accurate. I knew that my vision was compromised and I was seeing an unclear picture of what actually existed. But it didn’t matter. My eyes were only capable of seeing blurry, double vision. And now that they are working properly, it’s hard to imagine seeing it any other way.

And the truth is, I honestly didn’t believe my eyes for a little while. Everyone kept asking me how many of things I was seeing after the surgery. It looked like one, but I know I can WANT things into existence. Or at least into perception.

Seeing what I want to see, believing what I want to believe has been part of my personality as long as I can remember. And I wasn’t sure if I was actually seeing one of something or I just really, really wanted to.

The spiritual gift of discernment is notably missing from my inventory. What I’m lacking in discernment, I make up for in an overabundance of faith and benefit of the doubt, even when I situation has not warranted it, even when people don’t deserve it. It can be endearing, but I regularly end up shocked and heartbroken that my loved ones and heroes have, as Brad says, ‘feet of clay.’

And I can see clearly now, but the process was not fun.

As uncomfortable as it is right now, I am absolutely thrilled with how well it worked. Kinda like those infomercial products. I can’t believe it actually worked!

The surgeon measured my eyes based on what I told him I was seeing. He plugged the numbers into a formula so he knew exactly how many millimeters each eye was off. He went in there, cut the muscles to the back of my eyes and reattached them with the right amount of tension to line my eyes up with each other. The fact that he lined them up perfectly on the first try is mind blowing.

And then the second part of the vision correction was glasses. He wrote me a prescription for new lenses a week before my surgery, based on what he THOUGHT it would be AFTER my surgery. I put them on when I got them back on Wednesday and seriously, it’s like watching HD TV for the first time. Double vision is completely gone and the nearsightedness is corrected with my glasses.

Brand new eyes. Eyes that see everything as it is, not how I THINK it is.

My eyes and brain are still getting used to working as a team instead of limping along on solo trips. Whenever I change what I’m looking at, my eyes have to refocus for a second or two, kind of like the autofocus on a camera. It’s not automatic yet. And it still hurts.

But I have no complaints.

Not being able to see is a terribly helpless feeling. Knowing that not even glasses nor contacts could make my broken eyes work was incredibly frustrating and scary. And the tiny prospect of the surgery not working completely took over my imagination and I feared waking up and seeing absolutely nothing.

I have a T-shirt that says ‘Be Thou my vision’ that I wore the day before my surgery. It’s one of my favorite hymns. Old English lyrics strung together in poetry. I think the melody is a traditional Scottish tune. When Brad and I got married, that song played while I walked down the aisle.

I pondered those words as I lay awake the night before. Be Thou my vision. What a bold prayer.

Lord, give me Your eyes. Let me see the world the way You do because Your perception TRULY IS reality.

You see difficult people as Your beloveds, made in Your image. You see the brokenness of this world as why Your Son died on the cross, to be redeemed someday. You see what it was created to be and what it will be again.

You see it all with perfect clarity, but You are not afraid. You knit me together in my mother’s womb, every piece of me, INCLUDING my eyes. All of their intricacies, all of the misshapen parts. You knew what I saw and You knew what I couldn’t see. And you gave my surgeon the ability to fix it.

I just wonder in what other ways my inaccurate perception distorts what I see. Certain problems are multiplied and they appear to be more/bigger than they are. Issues are unclear, the edges blurred until I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.

In what other ways do I need to let You make me really uncomfortable for the sake of being able to see clearly on the other side of that pain?

I can’t believe it worked. I can’t believe my eyes. I was blind but now I see. I see through my clear yet still flawed eyes.

And it’s beautiful.