A patient's-eye view

September 19, 2025 David Slack

Each day at 4.30pm my brother calls in at the rest home in Masterton to see Dad. He takes care of almost everything. You'll be with him when his phone rings and after a pause he'll say, "No, sorry, this is his son. He's 99. So I'm doing his communication for him."

 

My visits from Auckland can be months apart. Five minutes after you've left, he'll have forgotten you were there, but every time, his face lights up and it's a warm happy visit. Naturally, you feel bad you're doing so little, so you're pleased when you hear there's something you can do to help.

 

Just a month after my own intraocular lens procedure (Chalkeyes, May 2025), my brother said, "Dad's got a cataract surgery scheduled."

 

“How's that for a coincidence?” I said. I then wondered if the short-term memory loss might be a problem – would he become bewildered during the procedure, or puzzled afterwards to find his eye covered with a patch? So I decided to go along with him.

 

Checking him in at the hospital, we explain about his memory loss and they make room so one of us can go in with him. It's the same prep I had four weeks earlier: name, age, confirm the procedure. You don't get the sense Dad has really grasped what's at play here, but he's happily going along with it all. At one point he hams it up for the nurse, feigning horror at the idea of anyone coming at his eye.

 

When it's his turn, I explain again about the memory loss. The nurse says it's fine for me to come in. "One of us would have been sitting next to him holding his hand but you can do that job." So now I'm getting gowned-up too.

 

Out of the wheelchair and onto the gurney. As they begin to work I get to see all the elements that were out of sight during my own procedure: the device that holds your eye open, the surgical instruments, the sheet they spread across your face with a hole cut above your eye.

 

The surgeon introduces himself and explains what's going to happen. There's a screen so I can see the whole procedure in vivid detail. It's amazing, once you get past the jarring thought that it’s your 99-year-old Dad's eye those sharp objects will be going into.

 

I watch the scalpel move delicately, doing its work like some exquisitely tiny spatula being slipped beneath a little egg. The surgeon describes each step as we go. Dad's quiet, just going along with it all. Throughout I'm doing my assigned job of holding his hand – something we would have last done when I was three years old.

 

Then a sound begins that had intrigued me during my own procedure a month before – a friendly musical tone that rises and falls. Now everything is clear: it's calibrated to the monitor reading out data, guiding the surgeon on depth and measurements. I watch the old lens being reduced to crumpled plastic tissue and removed. Out comes a 99-year-old lens, in goes a new intraocular one.

 

The surgeon tells him it's all done and that it went perfectly well. Dad exclaims that he didn’t feel a thing. You hear this and wonder if the whole thing was making sense to him all along. Or is he just saying that because he still knows what to say in a given situation – the vestigial muscle memory of social exchange?

 

They help him back into the wheelchair, we thank the nurse and sit for a moment while my sister brings the car to the door. Dad touches the bandage and says, "I've got something strange on my face.”

 

The whole experience was imbued with the gentle patience of everyone involved: the nurse who smiled when Dad hammed it up, the surgeon who took the time to explain each step knowing Dad might not retain it, the staff member who said to me "You can do that job". No one rushed him, spoke over him, or treated his memory loss as an inconvenience. They treated him with the same professional skill they'd shown me a month earlier, but with an added layer of kindness that acknowledged his 99 years.

 

This is really just my way of saying, again, to all you eyecare professionals: thank you, so much. Not just for the remarkable precision with which you do your work, but the humanity with which you do it.

 

That's worth seeing clearly.

 

 

David Slack is an Auckland-based author, radio and TV commentator, speech writer and regular contributor to NZ Optics.