I’m Just Glad About Saffron, Saffron’s Glad About Me~~~~~~~

I don’t want to write this story, I don’t want it to be true, I don’t want to see it written down so that I have to claim it. I’m not done grieving yet, it comes and goes, and it is part of the process of letting go and being with what is. I take one step at a time, processing what is happening in the now, and doing what is necessary for healing. I want to go back to before it happened and erase it. Instead, I found Saffron, but first the boring details.

I have worn glasses since the summer after 8th grade, because it was discovered that I couldn’t read what was written on the blackboard in school. I could read a book just fine and I could see long distance, although not in detail, but it was a full range vision with both eyes. I only wore glasses when I was out and about and later, for driving.

Last September, I had cataract surgery on my right eye, and I took money out of savings so I could get a more expensive ‘Cadillac’ lens so that this eye would be set for far away, and when I had the left one done later, after I saved up the money, I would get another ‘Cadillac’ lens and it could be set for close up and I wouldn’t need to wear glasses anymore. Or so I thought.

I was so happy after the surgery, I hadn’t seen that well since I was a kid, and I would just go outside and look at the clouds and the trees and birds in delight. Everything was in wonderful three dimensions.

I had follow up appointments after the surgery with my optometrist every week for a month and I told him that a black spot had shown up, but it wasn’t very bothersome. He said about 70% got one and it usually cleared up around 4 months and if it didn’t, they would do lazer surgery on it. One evening, I noticed that the picture frames weren’t straight and that they were a bit wavy, and as the days went by, they got a little more wavy. I was due back at the doctor’s office in about a month, and figured it was something that would be corrected with the surgery. I had no idea that it was more serious and irreversible.

When I arrived for my four month appointment and told the woman running a test on me, she said to tell the doctor about the waviness, and I did. He put the chart up on the wall and asked me what I saw with the right eye, I told him nothing but a big black spot. I could not even see the big E and I told him that what I was able to see with that eye was wavy and distorted. He told me I needed a test that he didn’t have the equipment for in this office so he made an appointment with the surgeon to run the test there and do the surgery. (All the doctors are from larger towns and come to my small town one or two days a week, including my dentist).

The appointment was two weeks away and the surgeon got sick, so it was rescheduled for another two weeks later. I got online and talked to friends and did research. I might have wet macular degeneration and the treatment was a shot in the eyeball every month, but I really didn’t know for sure, what was wrong.

My oldest daughter came down to take me in for surgery. They ran tests and showed me where the left eye was OK, but the right eye was seriously not normal looking, with lumpy blood vessels in the back of the eye. He called a retina specialist to ask him if he should do the surgery or wait. The specialist told him the surgery would make it worse and to send me to Jackson immediately. My appointment was the following Monday, which was MLK Day. It was now well over 2 months since I noticed the rippling. It had gotten much worse, the black spot had grown larger, and I had stopped driving at night.

My daughter came back down to take me on Monday, and the retina doctor, who was from India, wanted to know what took me so long to get in to see him because the longer you go, the more damage there is. I told him the last doctor got sick and delayed my getting here. More tests were run, one of them made my urine turn a beautiful neon yellow. He told me I had wet macular degeneration, and yep, I was getting an eyeball shot. He said he hoped it would take my sight back to what it was before the cataract surgery and they would evaluate it again in about 4 months. Absolutely under no circumstances was I to have cataract surgery on the other eye, because the same thing would very likely happen to it, and then I would really have vision challenges. I considered it a blessing that I didn’t have the money for the second eye. He also said it was hereditary and my children should be checked every year. (My grandfather and my mother had vision challenges).

He told me to eat Indian food as it was good for the eyes and prescribed eye vitamins (I had already been taking them for 7 or 8 years), and to eat lots of greens, etc. I asked him if that was his Porsche out in front of the office and he said yes, and I told him about the 1966 Porsche that I had many years ago. He said if I still had it, it would be worth more than his.

Now that I was in their system, I could see one of his colleagues the following month at a clinic about 20 miles from me instead of 90 miles away. I arranged for public transportation for the next visit for my 5th doctor. (There was an ophthalmologist in there before the surgeon).This one told me that the shots were to slow down the loss of my sight and maintain as much of my peripheral vision as possible and that I wouldn’t get my sight back again. He didn’t give me an answer on getting rid of the black spot.

I got online again, did a lot of research, and discovered that sometimes Saffron (used in Indian food, along with curcumin) could reverse the symptoms but if you stopped taking it, they would come back again. I talked with my friend at The Tree of Life, they didn’t have any and he said it was expensive. About a week before my next shot, I went to a couple of local health food stores in Kentucky, and found some at the Mennonite health store, and then at a Kroger store, I was in business!

Every night I make tea and drop several ‘threads’ of Saffron in my OM tea cup, along with honey, ginger, and lots of love. I also do visualizations of both eyes being healthy and send this cute little fairy down in there with some love magic/energy to heal my eyes (she is the sister of the tooth fairy, who I have working on my teeth at the same time). I’m also eating so many carrots, that I may end up with orange skin, ugh.

I’ve now had three eyeball shots and this last time he said the fluid had gone down a bit and I saw the big E on the chart, for the first time in three months, although I might also be better at using my peripheral vision, so I will check that out at my next visit. I told him about the saffron tea I had been drinking for a few days and its effects on Wet Macular Degeneration, but left out the part about the eyeball fairy that rides in on a white unicorn with the tooth fairy who work on my eyes and teeth. Seriously though, I visualize the right eye looking healthy like the left eye, as I saw it in the pictures of the tests that were run.

My life will be changing, as I continue my aging process with as much awareness as I can muster, and I will plan for it and make it the best that I can. Perhaps I’ll get one of those self driving cars one of these days, and buy a few talking books, and maybe that saffron will work really well and I will continue to drive myself and read real books and make groovy art. In the meantime, I’m sorting and reducing what I have to move to a smaller place closer to family, in a small town that I picked out before all this started going on. And I will grieve when I need to.

We’ll ‘see’ what happens next in this wavy, ripply, adventure~~~~~~~

Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, the saffron that I found locally is grown in Spain, but the best is supposedly grown in Iran. It’s called red gold, and can cost as much as $20,000 for a kilo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mna7iUIP2fM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfUrLteNu8E

I don’t have a photo of saffron, so you get one of my irises instead.