(Mostly about my life, but there’s some medical vocabulary in there.)
At the dentist’s last Thursday, me wearing 😎protective eyeglasses😎:
(Photo by Kim Darnell)
After cleaning, just before setting up a long appointment for next week, to get two crowns, the day after an appointment with the nephrologist and not long before two months devoted to cataract surgery begin.
This week is the only one in months without a single medical, dental, or optical appointment. Whee! It’s vacation!
My last medical report here was “A stay in medical Antarctica” on the 4th, about myocardial perfusion imaging via SPECT, to check for occlusions in my coronary arteries.
Brief results: my coronary arteries are beautiful. (And my lungs are clear; you get a lung scan for free when they’re doing the heart.) That leaves a mystery as to why I’m still so short of breath under exertion, especially in hot weather; maybe the nephrologist can explain that when I see him next week.
In any case, my cardiologist had insisted that I make no plans for cataract surgery until my heart situation was clarified (she clearly supposed that I’d need a stent or two inserted, or have triple bypass surgery, so I’d be in no shape for eye surgery). But then she gave the go-ahead to the eye surgeon, so now I have nine appointments spread over two months: two measurement appointments, then for each eye, one surgery and two postops, and a final followup. That’s what I’m doing for the fall.
I’m looking forward to escaping from this blurry, hazy world and the devices I have to use to read and write: magnifying glasses, software to blow up images on my computer screen, and so on. And still I misread a lot and fail to catch a ton of typos.
About cataracts, from Wikipedia:
A cataract is a clouding of the lens in the eye which leads to a decrease in vision. Cataracts often develop slowly and can affect one or both eyes. Symptoms may include faded colors, blurry vision, halos around light, trouble with bright lights, and trouble seeing at night. This may result in trouble driving, reading, or recognizing faces. Poor vision caused by cataracts may also result in an increased risk of falling and depression.
… Prevention includes wearing sunglasses and not smoking. Early on the symptoms may be improved with glasses. If this does not help, surgery to remove the cloudy lens and replace it with an artificial lens is the only effective treatment.
… “Cataract” is derived from the Latin cataracta, meaning “waterfall”, and from the Ancient Greek καταρράκτης (katarrhaktēs), “down-rushing”, from καταράσσω (katarassō) meaning “to dash down” (from kata-, “down”; arassein, “to strike, dash”). As rapidly running water turns white, so the term may have been used metaphorically to describe the similar appearance of mature ocular opacities [cataracts are said to “mature” or, more vividly, “ripen”]. In Latin, cataracta had the alternative meaning “portcullis” and the name possibly passed through French to form the English meaning “eye disease” (early 15th century), on the notion of “obstruction”. Early Persian physicians called the term nazul-i-ah, or “descent of the water” — vulgarised into waterfall disease or cataract—believing such blindness to be caused by an outpouring of corrupt humour into the eye.
Note on the title of this posting. It’s from “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”, the title of Timbuk3’s one hit; see my 12/26/15 posting on this blog.
August 22, 2017 at 6:27 am |
I was briefly misled about the subject of this post, since I’ve been seeing a lot of photos of people wearing protective glasses over the past day or two.