What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

It’s Time

.142. .142. IT’S TIME i sat with two other patients in the same tallwindowed room where I’d been prepped for my first cataract surgery exactly two weeks before. Across from me, a woman soon to be wheeled away to the operating room was waiting for the intravenous sedatives to take her dreamily. She had a long, bony face and prominent teeth, which sat in her mouth like a double row of tiny backsplash tiles. Separated from her by a curtain sat a man still a bit postsurgically stupid. He was robotically drinking orange juice and eating a blueberry muffin. His head of white hair was mussed as a nest. Tape held a protective patch over his eye, as it had held one over mine two weeks before and very shortly would again. I recognized the muffin-eating man’s state of still-returning consciousness, that stage of recovery when you have the sense that you’re observing yourself from some place outside yourself. And watching the woman, her mouth going slack, I recalled the moment of departure as the anesthetics had led me, just as they were leading her, to a luxurious realm of suspended time. So, in looking at these two, I was looking simultaneously at my past and my future and feeling a high-five simpatico, a silly sense of a it’s time .143. bonhomie. I imagined calling to the man, welcoming him back. I imagined assuring the woman all was going to be fine. In the weeks before my first surgery, I’d watched website videos of cataracts being removed. I found it pretty absorbing cinema once I got used to seeing micro-sharp needles and blades and beveled tips poking around in someone’s eye to a soundtrack of cheesy triumphal music. I’d viewed an ultrasonic stream pulsing through an extremely miniature surgical instrument, a kind of pneumatic drill and vacuum cleaner in combination, which first broke up the lens—the image in the video looked like a thin sheet of ice cracking and fissuring—and then sucked up the fragments. From some instructional literature I’d learned that there are many subtle variations of this two-step procedure, one that the world of ophthalmic surgery refers to in terms that are unsettlingly barbarous: “divide and conquer,” “chip and flip,” “stop and chop,” “four quadrant cracking.” For years, I unthinkingly imagined cataracts growing over the outer surface of the eye. But instead they’re a congealing of the lens, and the lens, of course, resides considerably inside the eye. It’s vertically suspended in the vitreous fluid, behind the outermost shield of cornea; and behind the concentric pattern of pupil and iris and white sclera; and behind still further internal layers of muscle and tissue and membrane, all with their unique and indispensable assignments, some of them chemical, some mechanical, some a matter of elementary plumbing. It looks, the lens, like a sleek little bean, an elegant oblong of transparent tissue, and is itself a marvel of laminate fineness with it cortex and epinucleus and nucleus, expanding and flattening as it goes about its task of bending the light that passes through it and directing it, focused, to strike the retina. Two weeks ago, I’d been thrilled to think that I would have this geezer procedure, twice, and I would see better than I ever had—ever. I’d begun wearing glasses, their lenses thick as pond ice, when I was five, and some sixty years later, with my cataracts it’s time .144. removed, the world would appear to me as it never had—crisply, without the aid of glasses or contact lenses. In the matter of my sight, I’d be younger than I was when I was young. Time, my time, was not merely being reversed; it was going back to and beyond the place where it had started. Now, as I waited in the same room, at the same hour, for the same reason I had waited a fortnight ago, I imagined that earlier morning as a transparent sheet being placed over this one and I sensed the two almost perfectly aligning. It was if I were having a nearly déjà vu experience. The short, round nurse who’d checked me in the first time was consulting her clipboarded records as she once again approached, and I knew when she reached me she was going to put the indicative piece of tape over my eye. And...