As I waved goodbye to Mellisa yesterday I knew that I still had 4 more days of just sitting around Beverly Hills, waiting for my 1 week post-op so that I could go home. For many individuals this might not be a bad thing, but I had already had my fill of the area in a short span of time. Since I was already in debt up to the top of my head from the trip and I don't like roaming alone by myself, I knew that most of my time would involve just watching a lot of HBO, playing online poker, surfing the net, and just waiting.
After having an emotional downer of a day on Friday, I was seeing a little more progress on Saturday after Mellisa left. I didn't exactly give my eyes a variety of different things to look at yesterday, but part of the recovery is just a general feeling that I am seeing more "normally". After playing a bunch of games and watching some movies on HBO, I left my room at 6pm to go find something to eat and really got a taste of what night vision is going to be with my IOLs. As I looked from side to side at a variety of headlights and bright signs, I quickly knew that I would have to learn to adapt to the fact that THIS is what things were now going to be like. I have no idea how much of a problem this will be with driving when I get home or if it's something that I can get used to in a rapid amount of time, but I'm going to have to get used to it as soon as possible. I've gotten used to other medical maladies in the past. From my bad heart / artificial heart valve to my blood tests to my Eustachian tube dysfunction in my ears, I have gotten used to other difficulties, and I will get used to this as well. Since I don't enjoy driving at night much any more as it is, I hope that the difficulties will be marginal. I'm confident. I have to be.
My eyes still look like a mess. I think it's going to take a looong time for them to get back to normal and so does Mellisa. My right eye is so bad right now I don't even have to explain to anyone that it's not happy with me right now. Just a quick look is more than enough to tell the story at hand. Mellisa took a few pictures the other day of my eyes but overall I haven't taken many pictures of my time out west. I figured that I would be snapping a lot more pictures in Vegas and Los Angeles, but pictures are more about the people in them, and I just didn't think snapping flash photos in my direction just after my eye surgery was the greatest idea in the world. I could and probably should have taken more photos while I was out in Las Vegas but I just didn't make the time to do so. I'm sure it was due to my mind being on the surgery yet to come.While the main focus of this trip was the surgery that would hopefully improve my eyesight for the rest of my life, I knew that this would be a life-changing trip in more than just that one, major way. I wanted to take this entire experience and soak it up like a sponge, and then wring every drop out of it that I could get. For some that might involve going out to clubs or visiting theme parks or just going on a sight-seeing tour, but that was never my goal during this trip, and besides, that's just not me in the first place.
I knew that of the 2 weeks I would be away, 1 week of it would be totally alone. No time with my friends like Yorky or Dan, no time with my wife, just time all by my lonesome. When I was growing up, I would have considered myself a loner, but after college that was no longer the case. Probably feeling the anguish of spending so much time alone when I was younger, I quickly gravitated towards other people. While I have had trouble with relationships over the years and tend to say the wrong things to people, I still find that I need to have people around me. My first response is always to crawl in that hole by myself where it's safe, but as the years have gone on, that urge is less and less than before.
Needless to say, the prospect of such a massive amount of time by myself was not something I was looking forward to, and I am already not enjoying it. Yes, I am staying in a hotel room in Beverly Hills for $200+ a night with a plasma TV and a gorgeous bathroom, but how much enjoyment can I get if I am spending it by myself?
Aside from the eye surgery, there were multiple things that I wanted to experience with this block of time that would be so hard to do at home. Instead of writing a paragraph on each, it would be easier just to make a list and then summarize.
- Enjoy the warmer weather and explore a little bit of Beverly Hills (I would say Los Angeles but it's quite clear that BH does NOT encompass LA as a whole).
- Get a taste of Las Vegas for the first time in 10 years. I hadn't been out to the gambling mecca of the world since going with my parents and grandparents when I was 21 years old. Not only did I want to get a lot of gambling in, I also wanted to enjoy the new sites and hotels of a place that I had such fond memories of visiting back in 1996.
- I had been playing online poker since the summer of 2004 but never had any real success playing, even though I had put in a lot of time and energy into the matter. One of the major stumbling blocks to my lack of success I felt had to do with not having a block of time that I could dedicate myself to seeing if I could have any success playing online. Now I have felt for a long time that all the online sites are rigged in the sense that the random algorithms weren't truly random, but after hearing of all the recent success stories from someone I knew, I wanted to use this massive amount of time to see if I could match any of his triumphs.
It certainly did just that.
Being alone all this time in a new place did not make me yearn to be away, it made me appreciate my normal little life so much more. It made me analyze and revitalized me to enjoy the simplest things even more than before. In a fantasy world of wealthy people and toys, I came to care even less about these things than before, a process I had been going through the past year or two as it was. I had said the last couple of years that I was getting sick of the cold and wouldn't mind living somewhere warmer, but after spending nearly 2 weeks in ~70 degree weather, I will not complain when I return to the bitter January cold of New England.
I told Dan Nadeau the last full day that we were in Las Vegas amid all the lights, money, and action that if I could leave at that very second to go home I would do it in a second. I think Dan was shocked at my answer, but being away from my daughter was something that I quickly didn't want to experience any time soon again. After spending days upon days of time alone I realized that it wasn't just Isabella that I missed, but it was my life in general. Being with 1 person for 6 years every day you sometimes need a break, and I don't think that this time for Mellisa and I being apart was a bad thing at all. Feeling what it was like to not be with each other every day just made us appreciate each other that much more, and her flying out here to take care of me means so much to me. Mellisa says that she had to do it, but no one was forcing her to get on a plane and nurse me as I was screaming in pain last Tuesday. Even though I expected her to travel to LA to be with me, I don't take it for granted.
$13,000 for a new set of eyes and an opportunity to better appreciate my own little world and family at home. In the long run that doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.