It all started with a routine eye exam.

“Your eyelids are getting droopier and droopier,” said Dr. Rod Morgan. “They’re already blocking some light into your eyes. Pretty soon they’ll start interfering with your vision.  And we can fix that.”

Now I’d never worried too much about droopy eyelids in the past. In my own twisted positive self- image  kind of way, I thought maybe my eyelids were cute. Like Paul McCartney’s  before he got all wrinkly. But why not get them fixed?

The fix came about four weeks later, and it’s just astonishing how casual these kind of procedures have become. I signed in at the Royal Alex eye clinic with at least 50 other folks at 8:30 a.m  About 9 a.m. my name was called, and a nurse led me to a small examination/procedure room just off the cattle-call room.

It’s like going to the dentist!  They don’t even tell you to take off your shoes, just hop up on the operating room table. Within minutes I had drops in my eyes and towels around my head that made me feel like a nun.

Doctor Morgan appeared, we exchanged pleasantries and, just as he was injecting anaesthesia around my eyes (that was the most unpleasant part of the procedure  – momentarily more painful than when dentists are zapping the same stuff into your jaw, and then they have to do the other eye as well.)

Somehow, we ended up conversing about the classic English comedians – Peter Sellers, The Goon Show, Monty Python. We chatted as he drew up a cutting plan on my now- frozen eyelids, chatted as he was actually slicing out, layer by skin layer, the portion of the droopy skin  destined for some nearby incinerator. The only slightly weird thing was the occasional tug.

By the time he moved on to the sutures, our conversation had moved on to the relationship between the eye docs and the heart surgeons, as this eye doc maintains eye docs were the original micro-surgeons.

Within a half-hour, he was all done, sutured up my eyelids and bandaged some big ol’puffy eyepatches over my eyes for the next 27 hours. An hour later, all done but temporarily without sight by 10:30 a.m. and I’d learned a lot about English comedians inbetween.

Blindness, interestingly enough, was not all that interesting. If you’re in familiar geographical territory, you can figure out fast enough how to get around. Slow down, move carefully and you can find your toothbrush and put on the toothpaste.

But being blind means you can’t read or work at the computer. Suddenly the hours opened up, without the pressing need, as in the last 20 years, to fill them with must-do priorities. I sat around the kitchen table, talked with my wife and kids, listened, truly listened to Ron Wilson on CBC, my pal Rob Christie on Capital FM once I’d figured how to move the radio tuner without sight.

We had a house guest, a priest from the Philippines staying with us for the week. And I had the immense privilege of having the time to simply enjoy his company, enjoy the conversation with this interesting lively man, enjoy the time to actually contemplate what was being said. Plus Father Felix was a fine musician, a piano player and for the first time in years I sat in my blindness beside him at the piano  and sang my heart out.  It’s the pow-ow-er of love, oh yah, the power of love.

The next day, back to see Dr. Rod, off come the eye patches. Sight is restored. All is normal, the hours past are immediately dream-like. One still looks like Frankenstein for a week until the next doc’s visit when the suture bandaids and bandaids are removed. Like Zsa Zsa Gabor, I wear dark glasses at night to hide my disfigured face!

If there’s a lesson here, it’s learning to live, from time to time, as if enough senses have been deprived to make the others, i.e. the joy of communication, just a little more acute.

Post operation, swathed in eye-pads … then ze Frankenstein look!