I heard it this morning on NPR: the success of Avatar has paved the way for a future in which movies, TV, billboards, and computer screens will all be 3-D. Receiving data in a mere two dimensions will soon be totally outmoded. Only problem: those pesky 3-D glasses.
But help is on the way. It seems a San Diego ophthalmologist has devised a surgical technique to reshape the eye so that it is receptive to 3-D images, without benefit of glasses. It’s still in the experimental stage, but there are already some satisfied customers.
The news item startled me. After all, in December I underwent eye surgery of my own, to remove from the rear of my left eyeball what is known in the trade as an epiretinal membrane or macular pucker. (So many names for the same disturbing condition, which clouded my vision and gave me the sense of seeing life through a veil.) It’s not that the surgery was painful. Actually, as an eye doctor will be the first to tell you, eyes don’t feel pain under surgical conditions. It was more the anticipation of a doctor cutting into my eye, tinkering with the precious organ that allows me to see the world.
Fortunately, all went well. (Thanks, Dr. Hanscom!) The scariest moment actually came the day after the surgery, when the patch that had covered my eye was removed and I found myself suddenly seeing double. I held up my left arm—all at once there were two of them, and I didn’t know which one was real. Then I looked across the room, and my husband had two heads. Somewhere in all that, there’s definitely a horror film waiting to be written. But I was relieved to learn that my double-vision was a normal, and blessedly temporary, result of the anesthetic that had kept my eye muscles in place during the procedure. Within hours, I was my old self again, only better.
Still, when I heard that news brief, I couldn’t quite fathom why anyone would voluntarily undergo eye surgery for the sake of dumping the 3-D glasses. That’s when the skeptic in me finally began to awaken. That enthusiastic woman on the radio who described the after-effects of the surgery: what was it she’d said? Oh yes, “Seeing Gnomeo and Juliet without those horrible glasses was life-changing.” That’s when it dawned on me. I’d been had. After all, it was April 1, and you shouldn’t believe everything you hear, even if it has the imprimatur of National Public Radio.
Happy April Fool’s Day!
