"Baby drove up with a brand new cataract...."

About 3 weeks ago I had a rather disconcerting optometrist appointment. My left eye has been steadily getting worse over the past year, so I assumed I needed a new prescription. My optometrist, however, was a bit flummoxed with just how much my vision had deteriorated in just a year. (Actually, it turns out it was 1 day short of a year, much to my chagrin, and much to the delight of the cheap bastards who run my vision health plan, VSP....) He wouldn't say what he thought the problem might be, but he made sure I understood I needed to see an opthamologist immediately.

Of course, HMOs being what they are, I couldn't go to an opthamologist without a referral from my primary care physician. (Lord knows what kind of scam I could pull if they allowed me to simply book in opthamology appointment all willy nilly.) And of course I couldn't get into see my physyician for about 3 weeks. I assumed i would die of the tumor I had convinced myself was growing in my brain long before that.

But finally, yesterday, I get in to see my physician, who takes a quick look at my eye and then makes a call to get me in to see an opthamologist immediately. I ask him what's the rush, why so urgent, AM I DYING FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST. He reassures me that it may just be a detached retina, which I don't find reassuring in the least, but, hey, it's not cancer.

Long story slightly less long, it turns out I have a cataract. It's very unusual to get these in only one eye, and before you qualify for the discounted movie tickets, so my opthamologist thinks it's probably been there since birth, and has only recently gotten large enough to be noticable.

So, in about 6 weeks I'll be going in for eye surgery. They will remove my left lens and replace it with one harvested from a juvenile kraken. Or a plastic lens, I forget which. For some reason my doc is suggesting that he'd make the lens in my left eye match the amount of near-sightedness I have in my right eye, which is pretty lousy. I'm not sure how that makes sense, so I think I may just go ahead and get lasik on my right eye instead, and have him give me a matching good eye. There's alaso the option of having a trifocal lens implanted, which would let me see near, mid-range, and far without glasses, which would be either nifty or unsettling.

If anyone has any experience in these matters, please leave a note in the comments or drop me an email.