No more X on my driver's license after 59 years of driving I will now be able to drive without glasses. Amazing really and I can read the street name signs which I couldn't do before Cataract Surgery (when my children were young I taught them to read very early so they could tell me the names of the streets we passed as I was driving then when they were off to school I just figured out my trip on a map with the streets counted; it worked very well. Who would have ever thought when I was a child of six and the student ophthalmologist ( no fully trained ophthalmologist ever said that actually; the student was just mistaken likely) said I would be blind by the time I was 20 that I would have cataract surgery and have depth of vision when I am nearly 80 and still be seeing. Absolutely amazing. Every day is a new view of things; even looking at the television it is 3D these days as my eyes get used to the brightness of everything and I can easily watch. When I was child I couldn't watch colour Television as it made my eyes so sore. It actually took a long time before I would look continuously at a colour TV. The tests (cognitive and vision) are very straightforward and the Ministry person helping me was so clear and precise about what one needed to do. I really appreciate that. At nearly 80 years of age I never imagined all these years that I would ever drive a car without glasses (59 years of driving with no tickets, no demerit points and no accidents on my record). Although likely I will wear them because I can readily see any numbers on the dials at the front with the bifocal portion but one is allowed to wear prescription lens (just not a necessity any longer if they happened to get broken or something and I had to wait three weeks for a replacement I could still go and buy my groceries). The retesting is every two years.
The last ten years before and these four plus years after my husband Edward passed away I was feeling the strain of nursing him and then recovering myself and my daughter wanted me to go to a doctor for a regular checkup every year (she is a physician but it is always better to have other opinions than your own). I think I will go back to my usual style through my life (every four or five years to the doctor to get blood work done and my current doctor is working with students and new appointments more so is pretty busy and I do not see her anyway). We will have moved by then to wherever my daughter ends up working as she is planning to return from the United States (she will be 55 in a couple of years) to spend some time with me which will be quite wonderful and actually she has a lot to offer her students). She did try to get a job at all of the Canadian Universities way back in 2009 but nothing offered so she took an offer at the university where she is an Associate and has been there for 16 years. Since I am getting older and older she wants to return and be with me so time will tell on that but she has a great CV and huge experience especially on-line teaching and setting up special credit packages and her research in AI. She works with masters students and PhD primarily but also teaches undergraduate courses.
I spent a number of years as the Administrative Assistant in the Hematopathology Residency Training Programme which was most interesting working with the residents and medical students and was an interesting learning time although I did work in the hospital laboratory in my younger years so not a lot of intensive learning but rather an update on what I did know so my background does help me. I just really want a quick visit to get a blood work requisition (I did discover that you can actually order one yourself now at the testing company so may just do that yearly). That would free up a spot for a new patient who doesn't have a doctor. The reality is that at 80 years of age one is looking at a short period not a long period in one's life and concentrating on doing the things you want to do is more important. Like all old people one does have issues; I have arthritis and do have to watch my diet but I do not want to sit and chat about it; I just want to care for myself with the knowledge already gleaned from doctor's visits and move on. I think what we need is some sort of a way to just go in and order things that need to be done at our local clinic for the masses of old people in the system (who know what they need) and free up physician time to do all the work that they have to do. There could be a review at the end of the day when items could be approved by them and such clerical work should be paid for under a code. That might make it easier to cover the millions of baby boomers struggling to keep finding a doctor. When I worked in the Urinanalysis Lab years ago people with diabetes came in once a month on a designated day and got the necessary testing requisitions for their care as I vaguely recall. We do have to be smart about this and create an easy way for people to receive care that they know they need and the worry about having an actual family doctor would perhaps be alleviated somewhat. As this large group of people move through the system we need to be clever to keep the costs down.
Avoiding the news cycle once again so as not to get distracted as I want to move ahead working on the matches (about 170 left to place) and then into the re-phasing of my grandparents and actual phasing of my great grandparents. It does involve a lot of work looking at what other people have done in my family lines back three and four generations. Then checking the original documents to see if that agrees with what I find and then I can get to the work of doing the generational charts in these books I am writing. Back to my latin translations as well once I get my new reading glasses as these bifocals are great for some things but definitely not a work horse if you want to spend long hours decoding old documents.
Prayers for the children of Gaza and the children of Israel - they suffer the most in all of this especially thinking of those little children taken hostage by the Satanic Hamas (who does that to small children, two little ones were actually murdered) and the little ones now free continue to recover from that horrific ordeal. Some do recount being held by Palestinians in their homes and not permitted to make any noise when they were told to be quiet but what kind of a people would hold small children hostage like that. I am still in disbelief on that. That there are sick people who kidnap children but 2 million people who would permit that is unbelievable but we saw it happen; we in the world on the newsreels. Free the rest of the hostages Satanic Hamas; what you are doing to them is criminal and unacceptable in a human world. Why do two million Palestinian people not help them escape?; I do not understand that. Given that the Palestinians here marched up and down the streets cheering Hamas (a hate crime and no one charged) and then set up encampments at our universities making a huge mess there which they did not clean up (a cost to the taxpayers) I feel free to write what I do since I had to listen to them ever since the assault on Israel. I especially do not want to see Palestinians working with our children as they lied to them.
My experience now getting everything fixed up as a result of this amazing cataract surgery has been a long year but I look at that picture in my living room and marvel at what I can see - it is like magic really to go from such a plain world as I lived in although I did know I lacked depth of vision to what I see now. A treat of one's old age I guess. I do not think even one face that I see is the same in those people that I know well and anyone else that I knew through the years I simply am not recognizing them. But one forms new images and gradually the world just comes to look like that and you forget how plain it was before.
Tea time and solitaire games.
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