As I've mentioned, I had a retinal detachment, and have been in for three successive eye operations, none of them pleasant. Presumably, this did more damage than just one operation, but the results will not be clear for months.

Like most people, I immediately search online for the experiences of other people suffering the same physical disorder, since that is where you discover that the unique is actually fairly common.

Except, it seems, in my case.  In various iterations of my freedom-seeking retina, I have seen a field of translucent green, looking somewhat like beach glass formed from an old Fanta bottle. Light comes through it, and some vague shapes. It has a solid look to it.

But I find that decent narratives of retinal detachment are not that common, and no one mentions seeing blobs of vivid green between them and the world they are trying to see. In fact, when I searched on it last week, I did find a reference--this blog, a few days earlier.

My surgeon, Dr. B, is blithely dismissive of my concerns. It's all normal, he indicates. We've been partners in this struggle since early April, and I have become an affront to his surgical amour propre, as well as, I suspect, a financial drain on his partnership--the insurance company pays a global for the surgery and followups. As a result, every visit from me no represents unpaid labor. I doubt he consciously recognizes that his lack of joy in seeing me is at least partly based on a financial calculation, but I certainly feel it is there.

I have no interest in having weird, off-brand symptoms. I want a normal recovery, no more than a sigma or two away from the mean, because I fear that every odd symptom is a sign that I will need further surgery, or that my eye will never recover any function.

That's enough about my intimate physical decline for a while. I wish I had had some spiritual awakening, or some epiphany about the rest of my life during my enforced face-down inactivity, but no. That is not something that seems to come to me. I did some plotting and thinking, but no more than I would do on a decent evening at the Diesel.  Which is where I think I will head now, to start getting caught up on my writing projects.