A brief note on the blogger's health...

Because readers have asked for an update on my health, and because, unlike most authors of memoirs, I hate to write about myself, I'll keep this note short:

It's OK.

There...Satisfied?

Alright, I suppose I can be somewhat more expansive:

It's no news to anyone that 2020 was a terrible year. It will likely go down as the worst year of many of our lives. In my life (cue the Beatles tune), the year began with blinding cataracts in both eyes that reduced my zone of clarity, even through monstrously powerful glasses, to a few inches in front of my face. The necessary surgery was delayed due to the pandemic, but by the beginning of summer I had undergone cataract extraction and lens implant surgeries in both eyes. Immediate results were positive--indeed, from my point of view, pretty fucking miraculous. My vision cleared and improved to the point that I could read without glasses for the first time since childhood. But then the Shit Year did its shitty thing. Because the implanted artificial lens is slightly smaller than the natural one, the vitreous gel inside the eye sometimes pushes forward after surgery, a phenomenon known as posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). In my case the PVD was particularly violent, tearing the retina and causing retinal detachment and blindness in one eye. During the month of August I suffered three separate retinal detachments and underwent three surgical procedures to repair them. The final surgery lasted three hours and left me with an eye filled with silicone gel, the only option for my multiply recidivistic retina. This repair has held--so far--and the world I now see consists of an occasionally annoying double exposure: the relative clarity of my undamaged eye superimposed upon the severely tunnel-visioned blurriness of its vitrectomied and siliconed twin. My next visit is to an optometrist for the eyeglasses that should help even things out. Bottom line: after a hellish 2020, I'm looking up.