When I was 22 years old, an optometrist told me that I had a small cataract in one eye. By the time we moved to New York in 1963, I was in glasses at least part of the time. By 1965 my vision had deteriorated quite severely. I went to see an ophthalmologist in Jamestown. He told me that while I had a serious problem with my cataracts, but he did not think I was ready for surgery and suggested stronger glasses. The glasses were stronger all right, but I couldn’t adjust to them. I started wearing them only when I was reading. That severely hampered my distance vision.
Sometime in early May we had a goal day. Back then churches often made a big push to bring out as many folks as they could on a single day. Ours was enormously successful for us. We had a record attendance. In an effort to get everyone to the service Charles drove to Corry, Pennsylvania to pick up a dear sister, who was shut in. We had been taking turns driving to Corry every Sunday afternoon. We would play the Sunday morning sermon tape for her and serve the Lord’s Supper. I agreed to drive her back to Corry after the evening service. I had great difficulty with night driving at that point in time. Three times I almost ran the car off the road on my way back from Corry.
When I went home that night, I didn’t talk. Normally, I would have kept Ann up for quite a while talking about the wonderful day. She’s a big help when I need to wind down. I simply went to bed that night. The next morning I told her that I thought we needed to go to Waco and see if I couldn’t have surgery on my eyes. Within two weeks we were on our way to Texas.
We had gone with the expectation of seeing Dr. James Scruggs. Ann’s old employer no longer did surgery, but Ann had worked in surgery with Dr. Scruggs and knew how good he was. We learned that Dr. Scruggs no longer took new patients, but that he had taken a younger doctor into his practice – Dr. David Dow. Robert, Ann’s brother, had worked in surgery with Dr. Dow and found him to be an excellent surgeon. Dr. Dow agreed to take me as a patient. At that time, Dr. Dow had just begun practicing medicine. I would end up staying with him until he retired, and I would stay with his successors until we moved back to Iowa in 2008.
At that point Dr. Dow had few patients, so he ended up spending the whole morning with me. He said, “I understand why they didn’t want to do surgery in New York. That would have been my judgment too except for the fact that you are 29 years old. We normally see this condition in patients who are past 65. You need your vision to maintain your level of activity. You have a small cataract in the other eye, and you need to have good vision in one eye while that one is going down. Besides that, your eye is beginning to veer to the side. If we wait six months I doubt that we can bring it back.” I didn’t think twice about it. I agreed to the surgery, and I thank God for putting Dr. Dow in my life. When he retired I wrote him a letter to tell him that I felt he had been a blessing from God.
Cataract surgery was much different in those days. Ann had cataract surgery within the last few years. I took her to the eye clinic one morning, and I watched the surgery on a television screen, which I will not do again. I discovered that there’s a nerve that runs directly from her eye to my rear end. When they told me I could see her, she was sitting up eating breakfast. Within an hour she was at home. They didn’t do it that way when I had surgery.
I was in the hospital for a week, and it took six weeks for me to recover. We stayed with Ann’s mother in Waco until I was able to travel back to New York. Toward the end of that time I was fitted with cataract glasses, those thick things they give just before they decide you need a seeing-eye dog. I’ll never forget walking out of the doctor’s office on Austin Avenue. I looked across the street. The Rainbo bakery, was perhaps a quarter mile from the office. There was a sign on the front of the bakery that read, “Rainbo Bread.” I had not seen that sign in my previous visits to the office, now I could read it clearly. I now had 20/20 vision in that eye. It represented a new way of seeing for me.
Shortly before the end of our stay, we went to Houston, where I reported to the Garden Oaks church (our sponsor) on the state of the mission in Jamestown. I could only use one eye at a time. There was no way to balance the vision with both eyes because of the extremely powerful lens I was wearing. To balance things off, they simply put a black lens over the other eye. The morning after I preached in Houston, a young boy told his father, “Dad, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard a pirate preach.”
After about three months I went into contact lens, and I was able to wear normal glasses with no correction on one side, and adequate correction for the unoperated eye on the other. The whole trip was a little upsetting to Ann when she learned that I had driven all the way to Texas with vision so poor that I could not have passed a Texas driver’s license vision test.
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