Ça s'est très bien passé !

The title of this post is what the ophthalmologist said to me yesterday after he had removed the cataracts from my left eye. ("This went really well !") I watched the whole operation on a monitor that showed the inside of my eyeball as the doctor worked. It took all of 15 minutes. This morning, wearing my old glasses, I can see just about as clearly as I could yesterday, before the surgery. That's what I hoped for. I can read the computer screen. Now I just have to wait until next Monday for un contrôle (a checkup) and a talk with the doctor. I think my vision will improve over the next month or so, when I'll have another meeting with the ophthalmologist. At that point, he'll give me a new prescription and I'll get new glasses if I need to.

Walt will drive me up to Blois for that one. He could have driven me yesterday, but that would have meant either having him wait around for two or three hours (with Tasha, so probably in the car) for the operation to be completed. Or he would have had to drive up up to Blois twice on the same day, spending four hours on the road. The taxi seemed to be the right thing to do. Next Monday, the checkup will take only 30 minutes or so, and will require only one round-trip to Blois. That's manageable. We might even be able to do some shopping in one of Blois's two Asian grocery stores.

The operation yesterday was once again without pain or even much discomfort. Before taken into the operating room for the procedure, I spent about two hours in a waiting room. I had nothing to read so I just enjoyed the show as the receptionist worked with patients to get their forms completed correctly, scolding them aimiably for not filling the forms out at home before coming to the clinic. I was one who was scolded; I didn't realize that I had to fill out a whole new set of forms for this operation after having filled the same ones out back in June. Nothing I put on the new set of forms had changed over the past three months. There were a lot of questions about my medical history, which I had given them in June.

As I sat watching and listening, quite a few patients my age or older were checking in for some mysterious session or procedure that began with the question Avez-vous le produit ? I was really curious to know what the "product" was but I never found out. Some of the people who had the product were charged about a $20 fee and others paid nothing. The ones who didn't have le produit also paid about $20. They were all asked to give the receptionist their date of birth, and there were people born as early as 1930 and others as late as 1952.

At about noon, I was invited to go take a seat in a different room accessible only to those of us who had appointments for eye surgery. The first step was to go into a little dressing room, undress completely, and put on a flimsy (but fashionable) bright blue disposable plastic pair of pants, a shirt, slippers, and a bonnet. My clothes and everything I had brought with me went into a locker. The key to the locker was the only thing I was allowed to take in with me — no watch, no jewelry, no glasses, no reading material. Nothing but the key.

I was asked to sit in a kind of recliner and wait. A nurse came by and checked my temperature and my blood pressure. She asked me what my background was, meaning my nationality. I told her I was American of Anglo-Irish ancestry. She asked me if I had taken off all of my clothes. Are you still wearing underwear, she asked. Socks? No, I said. We chatted a little. She listened to my heart and lungs with a stethoscope and asked me if I had been a sportif (an athlete) in my younger days. I told her no, I had never been a grand sportif. You have the heartbeat of a sportif, she said.

Back in June the process had been about the same, and I had stayed in my reliner for about two hours. It occured to me that the staff might not have been informed of my schedule change and were working on the original schedule. My admission time had been changed the day before to 10:30 a.m. rather than 2:45 p.m. Was I going to be in there for another three hours? There was no clock in the room that I could see. As the nurse kept coming by putting more and more drops in my eyes, telling me to keep my eyes closed as much as possible, and asking me questions, I kept forgetting to ask her if she knew what time it was. And then suddenly she said, Allez, on y va? On va marcher un peu. And off we went off, on foot, to the operating room.

More tomorrow...