Look, Ducks! Ma's got eyes!

I spent the last three days taking my mother to the university hospital a couple of hours away so that she could get what amounts to vastly improved vision. In the "old days" it would have been a corneal transplant or implant or something like that. And it would have taken months for her to get results and she'd have had a much more substantial convalescence.

But yesterday they basically removed the bottom layer of her cornea (which looked rather like the craters of the moon) and replaced it with a transplant of healthy corneal cells that will function as a much more efficient filter so that her vision will (everyone hopes) stop being cloudy and fuzzy all the time. And last night she went back to the hotel. And this morning I drove her back to the doctor's office, where they pronounced her "good to go." And I brought her home.

She's supposed to lie down for the next 24 hours, more or less, as she did from this time yesterday. And then she can get up and around and live life as she normally does. And already she reported brief moments of incredible clarity. Of course it blurs again, but she says she hasn't seen that clearly in years -- however briefly.

So . . . ain't medical science wonderful? I'm so astonished by how they actually think of doing these things, let alone figuring out how to do them. My hat is off to them all.

And frankly, the doc in charge could easily be a shoo-in for a "male on Monday" at the Pink Heart Society blog! But I won't embarrass him by posting him there -- lots of women would be having corneal transplants just to get smiled at by him. Even my mother fluttered a little!