For Better and for Worse

I dud not return to the Koch Eye Associates offices after the exam that followed the PRP session on 2 February 2010.
I felt like income rather than a patient. I received no answer to my questions about the onset of retinapathy during a series of procedures meant to prevent retinapathy. I had not been told that both the PRP procedures and the cataract operation posed risks to retinapathy development. I could not ignore that the retinapathy advanced and the "trusted" doctors who increased my risk factors had neither warned me about those risks or did anything to actually help.
From February to June 2010, things got better and worse. I was in denial that I was permanently legally blind. By April, I was trying to work again, with very limited success and a few glaring failures.
I think it is important that I kept trying. I’m a fighter and was unwilling to surrender.
The cloud of blood left behind from the vitreous hemorrhage of the previous October did slowly diminish in this time. The more active I became, the faster it seemed to heal. I resumed sleeping in bed rather than the recliner. Things were fuzzier when I woke due to a different angle of separation between blood and vitreous gel, but the obstruction reduced. I got to my optometrist–an eye doctor I could trust, Hendrick Krosschell in Attleboro Massachusetts–and did get reading glasses that worked for a time.
Unfortunately, as the vitreous gel healed, the retinapathy worsened. Flashers and wavy floors became routine plagues. My central vision in the one good eye cleared, but the overall vision reduced to just that central vision. I could see what I was looking at, but only what I was directly looking at. The peripheral had darkened and closed in to the borders of the cataract.
I could drive, with limitations. I really had to know where I was going because I couldn’t be extending my vision to check the surroundings and focus on the road. Because the cone of vision was wider at distances, it was actually easier to drive to the grocery store than to navigate among bustling people inside.
I clung to gratitude of what I did have instead of focusing on what I didn’t.
Despite the public demeanor, inside I seethed. I still seethe over the situation. Maybe this is some hindsight tunnel vision, but this was done to me. With more complete information, I would have made different decisions. I seethe even more because it continues to get worse.