(how I became an android in 3 easy payments)

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I don’t know what Santa Claus brought all of you for Christmas this year, but I got a shiny new pseudophakia.

Try to control your emotions. Don’t be jealous.

It all started when I went for my yearly eye exam, an annual bit of non-negotiable discipline to which I fervently adhere, every three or four years. My world-class insurance company (Big Tony’s Health Insurance & Same-Day Auto Detailing) only offered me two “in-network” eye doctor choices, so I went with the one whose office was in the mall – you know, because when I think “top-shelf professional medical facility,” I think of the mall. That, and shoes. Besides, after the eye exam, I could pop over to the mall’s Food Court, sit at a round damp table recently squeegeed by a guy who’s been using the same rag since Normandy, and gobble down a slice of Country-Fried Mongolian Hibachi-Style Greek Yogurt Pizza Sushi On A Stick In A Burrito Bowl-Fil-A, with a Diet Coke.

At the conclusion of my eye exam, Big Tony pointed out that that “future cataract” we’d been watching in my left eye had finally changed tenses, and the time had come to deal with it. (I didn’t appreciate him scribbling “senile cataract” on my medical chart, but Big Tony is all business when it comes to eye care. And auto detailing.) I was in no position to argue at the moment, because I was sitting in the dark holding a black paddle over one eye, which historically is not my strongest debating stance. Plus, I had to admit that when I closed my right eye – my “good” eye – suddenly nothing I looked at had any edges anymore.

So Big Tony called a specialist that his sister’s cousin’s aunt had recommended (Dr. Thelmund Louise) and we scheduled the “procedure.”

I totally forgot about the Food Court.

Now, I didn’t really know what a cataract was, except for some vague literary references involving waterfalls. I didn’t know if the eye version of a cataract was something on your eye, or in front of it, or behind it. But here’s the news: a cataract is a blemish, a defect, in the lens itself. Okay, fine. So let’s get to it and let Dr. Louise scrape it off, or burn it off, or just taunt it until it simply gets embarrassed and goes away.

No. That’s not how it works. Oh, no.

So now, I’d somehow managed to consent to letting some scalpel-slinging stranger named Thelmund remove the lens from my left eye and slip in a new, artificial replacement lens.

Pseudophakia (noun). An eye in which the natural lens is replaced with an intraocular lens. This is a common out-patient procedure usually performed near mall Food Courts, often by people named Thelmund.

A few days later, I drove to the local Lens ‘R’ Us, thumbed through some swatches, and settled on a nice, understated, very lensy-looking lens.

As it turns out, various Thelmunds successfully remove over 1.25 million cataracts a year, and, as previously mentioned, it’s an out-patient procedure. (I wasn’t entirely sure what “out-patient” meant, either, although I was hoping it meant “before we bring in all the sharp objects, we knock the patient out.”)

The staff were absolutely spectacular, and they made no derogatory comments at all as I whimpered in my pre-op stretcher, huddled in a fetal ball of fearless manhood. Since there were going to be drugs involved, I was advised to have someone drive me to the procedure, and home after. My Dad agreed to go with me, because my wife is useless for such things; plus, I haven’t met her yet.

In pre-op, I was instructed to take off my shoes, as if I were back at the mall. My next manly, hysterical thought was, “My shoes? Hey, you guys do know where I’ve been keeping this cataract, right? Right?” And then some Operating Room technician put a little “L” tattoo on my cheek under my left eye. Ha ha. You know, just to remind the surgeon. “Oh! I thought you said ‘remove the kidney!’ Ha ha ha! Oh, that eye! Ha ha ha!”

Pre-op humor. It’s an acquired taste.

I spent the next hour on my back, blinking through about eight gallons of eye drops as an IV drip fed me some exceptionally mellow “I don’t care” medicine. And just as I was mentally about halfway through The Beatles’ White Album, they wheeled me into surgery.

And then, twenty completely uneventful minutes later, I was sitting up, blinking my pseudophakia and contemplating my new life as a cyborg.

…and wondering if Thelmund Louise can hook me up with some more I Don’t Care.