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Cataract is a gentle thing.
It is not intrusive like a sudden heart attack or paralytic stroke or even the cloudburst of adolescence.
It is like the delicate onset of old age itself. With subtle differences.
If you were born, like me, with a fantastic eyesight, the first symptom of old age is the failing eyesight itself. Around 45 you will notice that slowly and slowly you tend to keep that book or the newspaper you are reading farther and farther away from you. Till they reach your arm-length.
And then you visit, reluctantly, the youthful eye-specialist in the Tech Market. He would ask you to read the chart on the wall and you do it like a breeze...to the last line. And then he would insert a 4-walled glazed lamp on which are etched sentences with letters of different sizes and rotate them, keeping the lamp at the near-point. And you fail to read them in small print. And then he would insert a corrective lens and then, lo and behold, a whole new world appears before you. You can read even the small print on medicine bottles. You are then into the bifocal regime. And you start respecting the eye-chap whom you deemed a cosmetic quack till then.
But nothing else serious happens to you and you feel as young as you were all the while.
Till street urchins and the new canteen boys start calling you: "Dadu!" instead of "Uncle!"
That comes as a severe shock and you closely inspect your image in the mirror and reconcile.
Nothing like that happens with cataract. It doesn't make you blind. It makes you fuzzy bit by bit. And you think it is is due to the glasses you wear and upgrade them into fancy stuff like polycarbonates with antireflective coatings. And forget about it.
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It is not intrusive like a sudden heart attack or paralytic stroke or even the cloudburst of adolescence.
It is like the delicate onset of old age itself. With subtle differences.
If you were born, like me, with a fantastic eyesight, the first symptom of old age is the failing eyesight itself. Around 45 you will notice that slowly and slowly you tend to keep that book or the newspaper you are reading farther and farther away from you. Till they reach your arm-length.
And then you visit, reluctantly, the youthful eye-specialist in the Tech Market. He would ask you to read the chart on the wall and you do it like a breeze...to the last line. And then he would insert a 4-walled glazed lamp on which are etched sentences with letters of different sizes and rotate them, keeping the lamp at the near-point. And you fail to read them in small print. And then he would insert a corrective lens and then, lo and behold, a whole new world appears before you. You can read even the small print on medicine bottles. You are then into the bifocal regime. And you start respecting the eye-chap whom you deemed a cosmetic quack till then.
But nothing else serious happens to you and you feel as young as you were all the while.
Till street urchins and the new canteen boys start calling you: "Dadu!" instead of "Uncle!"
That comes as a severe shock and you closely inspect your image in the mirror and reconcile.
Nothing like that happens with cataract. It doesn't make you blind. It makes you fuzzy bit by bit. And you think it is is due to the glasses you wear and upgrade them into fancy stuff like polycarbonates with antireflective coatings. And forget about it.
So by the time you realize that, whatever you do with your glasses, the fuzziness doesn't go away, the cataract has already progressed to 30% and more. And it is generally asymmetric...the two eyes become fuzzy at different rates.
And street urchins and canteen boys are no help. Not even your wife. Because your cataract is your own and lay onlookers can't tell you there is something wrong with your eyes. They are convinced you are faking it.
Because the eye lens doesn't become darker...it becomes whiter.
The damn thing is perfectly transparent in the beginning like water. And cataract is the process of the lens getting more and more opaque. Like water freezing into ice. Rather than getting dirty and black like Hyderabad sewage sludge:
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Happy Doctor's Day, Sir :)
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