I have written about so many memories that I have a problem remembering what I have written about. I have tried going back through the 140 + stories to see if a particular subject was somewhere in all of the words written so far but that doesn't help very much as they just seem to get jumbled up in my head. Every now and then a memory will pop into my thoughts that is so important to me that I have decided to blame senility if it turns out that I have already written about the subject rather than think I did but didn't. That last sentence is a little confusing but it is not important to the story but it was important enough that I wrote it, at least to me.
Linda had the most beautiful blue eyes but blue eyes generally are the weaker color. When I first met Linda she wore hard contact lenses, they were the only kind available then. Prior to the contacts, she wore glasses that had the thickness of coke bottles and every year she would get new glasses with a stronger prescription, the contacts seemed to cure that process and I don't remember her getting stronger contacts for many years.
She never said but over the years her sight would deteriorate and I would see her straining to see things. She did a lot of small, detailed work in her quilting and needle point, it was sad to see her lean in close to see that she did something that met her expectations but at the time there was no fix for her failing sight.
As the story goes, back in the 1990's, a young child in Russia injured their eye, a piece of glass cut the pupil or maybe the iris. When the eye healed the doctors noticed the child's vision had improved by flattening the Lense. Over the next few years, doctors perfected the technic which improved the eye sight of millions of people around the world. They called it "radial keratotomy", they actually made cuts to the iris like the spokes of a wagon wheel allowing the iris to flatten. Linda found out about this process and studied it, she knew of it's successes and failures, she knew which doctors were the best. She waited until she was sure the process was safe and right for her.
Just as the world was entering the new millennium Linda made plans for the operation. The doctor she chose would only operate on one eye at a time, the first eye had to be well into the healing process before he would operate on the second eye. It took about six or more months before the eyes were completely healed but each day seemed to bring new experiences into her life.
One day she came down to the living room wrapped in a wet towel and stopped in front of me. She said "Michel, I just took a shower" I said OK, she said "I looked down while showering and saw my toes". All of those years of wearing glasses and contacts and she had not seen her toes without them. She was so excited. A few days later she was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when she turned around and said "there are individual leaves on those trees", it was then that I realized just how bad her eyesight had been.
The whole procedure cost five thousand dollars out of pocket but it was money well spent, I only wish the procedure had been available sooner. Even with poor eyesight she saw nothing but the beauty of life and now she saw it more clearly.
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