Zip MartiniHello, friend. I know, indeed, it’s been no short while.
In late 2019, I was diagnosed with a PVD. Basically, the goop covering the retina in my left eye peeled off and is floating around inside of my eyeball. This is apparently not an uncommon thing to happen to “the elderly, and severe myopics pushing 50.” It has resulted in my vision being like lying underwater beneath a thin layer of ice, clear but swirly with dark dots floating this way and that. I was being treated by the good folks at Massachusetts Eye and Ear through the winter months, and I was told that the prognosis was good, and it’s very uncommon that this sort of thing doesn’t rectify itself on its own.
It didn’t.
Then COVID hit, and hospitals suddenly weren’t a place one would elect to be. In March, I went into deep quarantine due to historically dodgy lungs.; I’ve left my property line perhaps twice in the last nine months. I haven’t seen my eye doctor to figure out a solution (a vitrectomy may be in my future, as pleasant as that is to contemplate), or even to get a new contact lens prescription, which means on top of the minky eye I’ve also got my thick, distorting glasses on.
These are, shall we say, not the conditions under which the art of photography blossoms.
And yet, when I hear about people like Linda Tirado, a member of the press who lost her eye photographing BLM protests and went right back on the job scant days later? At some point it becomes time to start living with one’s limitations. At least I do have options for the future, correct? This is a year of hope, isn’t it?
In late 2019, I was diagnosed with a PVD. Basically, the goop covering the retina in my left eye peeled off and is floating around inside of my eyeball. This is apparently not an uncommon thing to happen to “the elderly, and severe myopics pushing 50.” It has resulted in my vision being like lying underwater beneath a thin layer of ice, clear but swirly with dark dots floating this way and that. I was being treated by the good folks at Massachusetts Eye and Ear through the winter months, and I was told that the prognosis was good, and it’s very uncommon that this sort of thing doesn’t rectify itself on its own.
It didn’t.
Then COVID hit, and hospitals suddenly weren’t a place one would elect to be. In March, I went into deep quarantine due to historically dodgy lungs.; I’ve left my property line perhaps twice in the last nine months. I haven’t seen my eye doctor to figure out a solution (a vitrectomy may be in my future, as pleasant as that is to contemplate), or even to get a new contact lens prescription, which means on top of the minky eye I’ve also got my thick, distorting glasses on.
These are, shall we say, not the conditions under which the art of photography blossoms.
And yet, when I hear about people like Linda Tirado, a member of the press who lost her eye photographing BLM protests and went right back on the job scant days later? At some point it becomes time to start living with one’s limitations. At least I do have options for the future, correct? This is a year of hope, isn’t it?
Gopal