Cataracts
There are very few of our senses that we prize more than sight. i think I am on safe ground with that statement though I imagine people who are blind or became blinded might make a valiant effort to disagree. If you lose your sense of smell or taste, I dare say you would go on in life with only minimal adjustment. Many of us start losing our hearing as we get older and tend to resist acknowledging it until it becomes a serious problem and we finally bow to the displeasure of getting hearing aids. A complete loss of hearing is a bigger problem, but again, we can find ways to move through life in a modified manner. I am unclear about what a loss of the sense of touch would do because I can’t say that with the exception of total paralysis that I have ever thought about how the loss of that sense might manifest itself. If it were just losing some sensation in the hands, I imagine we could muddle through, though I’m not sure I have ever heard of that happening to too many people. I have an annoying loss of sensitivity on the tip of my left thumb, which I hacked off last year while doing some aggressive gardening, but mild annoyance and small partial numbness doesn’t really count.
It really comes down to sight and hearing that are so very vital to maintaining life as well know it and it just seems that loss of hearing is more manageable than the loss of sight. I’m confident that the vast majority of people would agree with that assessment (excluding, of course, people who’s world revolves around something like music). It seems that 0.49% of the population is termed as being legally blind, but as much as 2% or more have a noticeable degree of vision loss that impairs them. 20% of people from 65 to 80 get cataract surgery. That rises to 50% for people who are 80 or older. Almost 1.5 million people per year in the Unites States get a cataract procedure. The average age of people getting that procedure is 65. I imagine there are many people with cataracts (a fogginess in the lens of the eye) that do not get the procedure, some because they do not feel they are visually impaired and perhaps some because they choose to live with it or can’t afford the surgery.
When we adopted our dog Betty a few years ago, she was blind from her diabetes. We took her in and had her cataracts removed so that she could see well enough to walk around and not bump into things. She did not get new lenses the way people do, but she was able to see well enough to significantly improve the quality of her life.
We were with someone this weekend that is going in for cataract surgery in the next few weeks. It is now a simple outpatient procedure, but they still usually do only one eye at a time to insure that the patient can still function while the surgery heals. What I didn’t know was that Medicare apparently will pay for cataract surgery, but that there is a new and improved version of the lenses (supposedly multi-focus lenses) that they will not cover and you have to upgrade to that on your own if you want the best there is on offer. I think that costs about another $6,500. I guess Medicare feels you only need to see so well for them to feel that they have done their duty to you as a citizen. Kim had cataract surgery more than five years ago (when she was about 60, so earlier than average), but who knows if she got the economy brand of lens or the new premium lenses.
Kim and I each have two older siblings. So far, Kim’s family have all gotten or are getting cataract surgery. My sisters and I seem to be fortunate to be people who all wore glasses for near-sightedness and astigmatism, but have not needed cataract surgery…yet. We range in age from 70-73 whereas Kim and her brood range from 65 to 78. The good news is that with that many people needing cataract surgery, the procedure has gotten very routine and there are few complications and recovery is quite quick. I had radial keratotomy when I was forty, but it only really worked in eliminating my need for glasses when I turned about 60. Since then I have been free of any corrective lenses of any sort. That’s a good thing since I value visual crispness, which is probably why I wore glasses soon after my RK procedure and only stopped years later when my eyes had reformed and fully corrected. I can’t be sure this state will hold forever, but so far, so good.
My house on the other hand is starting to go down the cataract path. We have about 60 windows in this house, including three sets of sliding glass doors and eight French doors, all of which are made with double-panned insulated glass. For the most part, since the house is 25 years old, we can assume the windows and doors are all more or less the same age except for one kitchen picture window which we replaced ten years ago and a few of the windows that were part of a remodeling that took place twenty years ago. The kitchen window got damaged during the kitchen renovation, so it died of unnatural causes.
Recently, the picture window (6’x7’) in the east side of the living room and behind the piano developed a broken seal that caused moisture to collect between the panes. There is very little more unpleasant in a home than a foggy window. It screams of a lack of home care and is as obvious as someone walking around with a rotten and visible blackened tooth. Houses are living things to a certain extent and when it is clammy outside, the window with a broken seal is all the more noticeable and offensive. On clear days it is equally transparent and looks fine. When I noticed the Living room window on a bad high-humidity day, there was no doubt it would need replacement. I know that Andersen is the gold standard in replacement windows, so I called their renewal service. They bid $7,500 for a replacement and suggested we do them both on that side of the room for a total of $15,000. I swallowed hard and thrashed about for a week to find alternatives that were less costly and finally settled on Andersen, but only replacing the one that was obviously damaged. The salesman suggested that windows all go bad when they are about this age, but I wasn’t buying that as anything more than good solid salesmanship. It takes several months to order the window, so I sat back and am patiently waiting my turn in the installation queue.
Last week we had some rainy weather and sure enough, I noticed another big picture window on the west side of the living room had some condensation on it. I checked inside and out and quickly determined that this window too had a bad seal and would need to be replaced. It’s the same size as the other one, so I know it will be another $7,500 and that hurts. Then this morning, I notices that one of the sliders in the bedroom that faces west had some condensation and sure enough, that too looks to need replacement. I don’t know the price on that, but at about half the size, I have to believe it will be more than $3,000. Ouch again. When I called the Andersen sales guy, he naturally said he was not surprised, but that did not serve to make me feel better. I still have another 50+ windows in this house and I refuse to let my mind go to that calculation. I want to believe that these three are only the outliers and that the rest are dodging the cataract bullet just fine. So, I guess the moral of the story is that I may have gotten lucky with my eyes for the moment, but my house getting cataracts is almost as bad.