My name is Dave and I'm writing on behalf of my wife whom you know as Bikette. She has asked me to let people here know that she is still around but unable to see well enough to correspond on her own. Even with extra big type size it takes her so long scrolling back and forth and up and down just to read or type a short letter. I don't know how she got through her tax work but her eyes are much worse almost every day now.
What frustrates her most is that this blindness is and was so reversible as it is only cataracts. She has been going to an optometrist every year for 10 years asking for help as her vision got worse, but the doctor kept blaming diabetes for her quickly deteriorating eyesight. Finally last fall, she complained to her diabetes doctor about going blind despite her major efforts to regulate her diet and medication to control the disease and they sent her to a new optometrist, but she had to wait for 2013 because she had used up her medical coverage by going to the old optometrist 5 times last year. That woman just kept giving her new prescriptions instead of any help and she has accumulated a dozen pairs of glasses now - all useless - and expensive!
Finally on 02 January, 2013 she saw a new optometrist who couldn't believe that anyone would miss such obvious cataracts but it has been 6 months now of trying to get an eye doctor to remove the cataracts and it just isn't happening right away. She has other complications as well as a firm handle on Murphy's Laws, so the first eye doctor let her wait 5 months before telling her she needed another eye doctor. She emailed him in February but he still made her wait until late May and then told her she could get in to see another doc in 2-3 days! He promised her she would have her eyes done in 2-3 weeks. That was May 21. She is most upset about being misled.
She finally saw another eye doc yesterday and he will operate but now the schedules are full with all the seniors back from Florida for the summer and the OR's are also on 'vacation schedule' so he doesn't even have a place to operate on her until September. But he promised to rush her in and book both eyes at once so she shouldn't have to wait another 6 months to get the second eye done.
She was originally told that she had to be conscious for the surgery and that both eyes would have to be done at once to avoid stress on the good eye now that they are so bad, but the story keeps changing and now they want to give her general anesthetic and do one eye at a time. She has had a lot of anesthetics which almost always end up with her getting pneumonia so she is not looking forward to the general anesthetic but I'm telling her to go along with them and just get the surgery done before I get too old to drive her everywhere!
In the past she has managed to get through her work with large fonts and double checking all her calculations but that is also really frustrating and time consuming. She is afraid her tax clients won't be back since she could not hide her obvious blindness this year. At this point she is not even trying to work and I'm glad because she should be giving herself and her eyes a break! She really resents the past 10 years of misdiagnoses and the long waits for her "rush" surgery, but I know she will get through this. Up until a few weeks ago she was still taking pictures of the birds at our little country house.
I have been able to use her login information to receive her email and finally to get into this website for any messages and I have read the comments on her page to her more than once now. She appreciates your kind words and wishes she could reply to them herself (and she is mostly dictating this letter to me), but her head hurts just trying to read anything at this point. This is a decade long eye-strain headache she has and it's giving her heck lately which is why I'm glad she finally decided to stop trying to keep up with her computer work.
I will try to check her email and this website whenever we are home and that might be more now since she has trouble breathing outside in the heat, so we mostly stay inside in the summer anyway. She wants you all to know that she misses her friends here a lot and worries about you often! I don't know much about navigating this or any website but I can try to keep up with the messages. I'm just not the typist my wife is and a letter like this takes me all morning! So I might not be able to get back to you but I will make sure she hears your comments, so thank you in advance for those and thank you for your concerns.
She wants me to tell you in my best Arnold voice: A'll be Bach! Now I'd call that a Gen. MacArthur voice but we are of different generations. I never thought I'd spend my retirement as a kittie sitter and guide dog, but I suppose it beats working!