My Three Amigos

The thing about having cataracts removed is the eye drops. They start you on drops the day before. Then you have the Surgery and after that it’s all about drops, four times a day. 

My dad had his first cataract removed when he was 90. He didn’t like the drops. Nor did he like driving an hour one way to Syracuse for the surgery AND again for the check-up AND then again when he had a granule in his eye. And he hated the drops. “What? You have to put those in again?” He expected that his sight would improve right away, so upon his request his doctor gave him a new prescription for his glasses ten days after surgery. And Dad didn’t like them; he said he could see no better. While he had lots of patience for some things, and most people, he had little patience for the whole cataract procedure and no amount of persuasion was going to convince him to have the other eye done. Period. He eventually changed his glasses two more times, finally going back to the original prescription. His eye just needed more time to heal.

Well, I have to admit the time for more eye drops comes around really fast. Four times a  day I lay down on my bed and address myself to the three bottles of eye drops on my nightstand. I call them my Three Amigos. I’ve even given them names: Dick, Flo and Fred, take-offs on their pharmacological names. Amy and I gave Dick a green cap, and Flo a red one and Fred... well Fred... I kind of wonder about Fred. Fred came out of the box with his own color - Pink!

I have to wait for five minutes between applications. That means the eye drop process takes from ten to fifteen minutes. In the morning and at bedtime, I have to put in one drop from each of the three. In between, twice a day, I only have to use Flo and Fred. It’s a good thing we have them color coded. I use them in a certain order because lying there on my bed for five minutes until time for the next drop, my mind drifts. All I have to look at is the ceiling; I can’t see anything well. So I might think about last night’s TV show, or some picture I scanned, or a crazy video I saw on YouTube. Then I realize it’s time to apply another eye drop. Did I just use Dick? Or was it Flo?

Now Dick is not very nice in the morning. His drop kind of stings for a while. Not so bad at night. Flo’s drop never hurts. She has the antibiotic. As for Fred. You have to give Fred a real good shaking to wake him up, and even then he is going to be really slow about releasing his drop. I lay there holding my bottom lid down with my left hand and holding Fred above my eye - waiting. I can see well enough, that close up, to know that I am staring right at the end of the dropper and the eye drop is just hanging there. “Come on, Fred, give it up! You’re such a slowpoke.”

And at bedtime, there is the danger of falling asleep before I have completed the three drop routine. That is a big NO-NO. Because I have to tape the eye shield over the eye so that I don’t scratch it or rub it or do anything to it during my sleep. “The eye must be protected at all times” warned Mary, the nice post-op nurse. So after Dick and Flo and Fred have done their duty, I drag myself off my nice comfortable bed to put on the shield, trying not to tape the same place on my face that I did last night. I’m even getting accustomed to not sleeping on my right side - well almost. I say goodnight to my Three Amigos and switch off the light. Another cataract day has passed.