John F. Kennedy used to tell a story about when he was a kid. He and his brothers would go hiking. When they would come to a fence, a ravine or a wall they had to decide whether to go on. Finally his older brother, Joseph would decide the matter by throwing his hat over to the other side. There by deciding the question, because they had to retrieve the hat.

I have thought about this a lot this week, because as you know from last week's letter I had cataract surgery done on my right eye. The eye, itself is doing fairly well.  I went to the doctor and he said my distance vision was nearly 20/20. The trouble is, that my eyes do not match.  I am left with the choice of going without glasses and just relying on the newly repaired eye, which does not focus closer than 3 feet. This makes things like computers, which are an important part of who I am and what I do rather difficult. My second choice is to wear my old glasses so my left eye works normally, but the right eye is completely blurry.  Unfortunately both options leave me with a large fuzzy headache producing halo around everything that is in focus. At the beginning of the week, I thought I was being exceedingly clever. I thought I had come up with a solution that would solve the problem very neatly.  I took my old glasses and removed the right lense. I figured the one eye would see well and the other eye would be corrected to see well.  What I had not counted on was how severe my correction is.  I had not expected the image through the glasses to be significantly smaller than the image through the now repaired eye.  My first inkling of this was when I was looking at my hand through the left eye, it looked normal and through the right eye is looked huge. I looked at myself in the mirror and was struck by how huge my right ear looked.  Now this I could work around except most of the time I use both eyes and it means when I am watching TV, for example, I have to carefully line up the two images in order to see what is going on.  This is not the most relaxing thing in the world especially because the image going through the glasses lens moves the opposite direction to the image through the repaired eye. After fighting with this all week, I decided the only solution is to press ahead.  I cannot really back out, my proverbial hat is on the other side already. I have no choice but to press ahead, heal up and do the other eye as soon as possible.

This is why I am dictating the letter to Marsha this week and why it is so short.

Doug & Marsha

PIX: A day at the beach