To see or not to see?, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Through all of the early convalescence stage, one question that even now won’t let go of my mind helped to distract from the restrictions that I had to observe post-surgery: How come the world has mastered the design and manufacture of machines that work at the levels of micro-surgery without which the occurrence of cataracts in one’s eye would be a sentence of blindness (or require extremely invasive surgical procedures), while the top of our national discourse is taken up by whether or not Akpabio was inappropriate to Akpoti?

For Odysseus, there was Scylla; and there was Charybdis. For today’s adventurer, the odds are slightly different, though. Still, the devil on one hand and the deep blue sea on the other, are no less formidable alternatives. Thankfully, life does not always breakdown into such dilemmas. In other words, the routes we must travel down are not always as Manichaean as the former two extremes suggest. They more often involve a range of options across extensive and often enlaced spectrums. But, always, there is a choice to be made. Even so, within either context, a cataract diagnosis presaged the eventual loss of sight — if not treated, at least. While at this point, the poser at the crossroads was not exactly whether to see or not to see, the consultant ophthalmologist that I met thought my notion of a prophylactic response to the cataract diagnosis slightly uneducated. “There really is nothing to prevent”, she said. “The clouding of the lens of both eyes is already taking place. The complete obstruction of the passage of light is only a matter of time.”

How soon? My optometrist, he delivered the diagnosis some five years ago, was not sure. He had seen worse, he said. Besides, he had seen folk outlive my condition. It was not just that the cataract was not “mature”, yet. He considered it possible that it might not worsen any further. And truth is, it was not, at this point, as bad an impediment as the myopia that I have had to live with for the past 44 years.

If the dilemma was as clear as night and day, the choice that had to be made was clearer still: between waiting until the cataract worsened, as I got older (and, then, having to be led by the hand through the entire process), or intervening, now (when I could walk in and out of the outpatient facility myself), to fix it. There were accessary concerns aplenty: Where to undergo the procedure? When? How to pay for it? The nature and quality of post-surgery care? etc. Except that intervention, now, was neither as easy, nor as simple as it presented as a problem. The phacoemulsification process for taking cataracts out is some of the most cutting-edge, run-of-the-mill medical procedures around today. And it is arguably one of the safest and most effective procedures for treating cataracts. Besides, uneventful, it takes all of 15 minutes to be done.

So, what was the hurdle, and how high was it? Prone to panic attacks and claustrophobic, there was no way I was going to sit still while some machine tinkered away with my eyes. I am not a Luddite. I just have a very healthy conceit for my eyes, and a tendency to look on the dark side of everything. General anaesthesia, then? I was told my fear of not returning from that type of deep sleep was pagan. The head of the medical function at my workplace chuckled as he reminded me that “medicine has come a long way” from all my apprehensions.

The protocols I was required to observe post-surgery were a genuine test of faith. Keeping track of the plenitude of eye-drops was no less torturous than adhering to the schedule for their administration. Then there were the physical restraints on what one could or could not do to aid speedy recovery. At some point, I reached the conclusion that the only state that was not verboten was sitting erect and staring into space in a dimly lit room.

Anaesthetised, twice, I missed the opportunity of listening to a machine make an incision in my eyes, dissolve the cataract there, suck both this cloudiness and the affected lens out, and replace the natural lens with an artificial one, which then unfolded in situ. In other words, I completely missed out on an experience that a six-year-old me would once have described as “American wonder!” Before you take a jab at the naïveté of my school-aged self, remember that Arthur C Clarke did say that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The protocols I was required to observe post-surgery were a genuine test of faith. Keeping track of the plenitude of eye-drops was no less torturous than adhering to the schedule for their administration. Then there were the physical restraints on what one could or could not do to aid speedy recovery. At some point, I reached the conclusion that the only state that was not verboten was sitting erect and staring into space in a dimly lit room. In the end, it required a certain measure of witchery to come through it all unscathed — mentally, if not physically.

Through all of the early convalescence stage, one question that even now won’t let go of my mind helped to distract from the restrictions that I had to observe post-surgery: How come the world has mastered the design and manufacture of machines that work at the levels of micro-surgery without which the occurrence of cataracts in one’s eye would be a sentence of blindness (or require extremely invasive surgical procedures), while the top of our national discourse is taken up by whether or not Akpabio was inappropriate to Akpoti?

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.