Surgery date set

Waited with Maria at Club de Leones again this morning, this time for a relatively short 4 hours. As anticipated, her health stats are fine so we went ahead and scheduled the surgery for 8 Aug, 8am (I told Maria this was an easy time/date to remember 8/8 8am, but she doesn’t do dates very well so she didn’t get it). As I’ve mentioned Maria can be quite exasperating at times, unintentionally. She was worried that she had high blood pressure, that she would be too nervous and shaky for the surgery because she is afraid and because she would be stressed out after having to attend to so many people staying at the house the week before…and then the 8^th might not be good because she would be tired and nervous from the week before etc etc. Maria is very childlike, both physically and personality-wise. Most of the time it is refreshing, but during times like this I just want to sit her down and say, “Look, just do the goddamn surgery asap”. It has been tricky balancing being stern enough about getting the surgery and all the preparations for it done, for Maria’s sake and because I’m paying and want to make sure my money is going to its intended purpose, and also being forgiving enough and tolerant of things like her fears and nerves; they are her eyes after all. I think I am not very tolerant/patient with people who scare easily and/or get scared over things not worth being scared about. Because my pain threshold has always been high, and made higher by my accident and recovery, I’ve never been very sympathetic to people’s physical pain or fear of pain. But I’ve had to be very patient with Maria because she isn’t educated enough to understand a lot of things, and because of my limited Spanish. Maria’s eyes were very sensitive to the sun after the consultation on Tuesday and she was freaking out fearing she was going blind. But because I couldn’t say in Spanish “your eyes are very sensitive to sunlight because the doctor dilated your pupils; you aren’t going blind”, I had to just reassure her that the situation was temporary, she wasn’t going blind, and she would be fine in half and hour or so.

Maria is going to need three surgeries in total, spaced about a month apart. The first surgery will be on her left eye where there is on big carnosidad obscuring her iris/pupil. The second surgery will be on one of the carnosidades in her right eye; the third surgery on the second carnosidades in her right eye. Obviously, this increases her medical costs, but I’ll cover that.

The doctor said only 3 days are required for her recovery, but Maria is paranoid and wants to take off 15 days! This means she will miss 45 days of work for her three surgeries. She hasn’t been paid for any vacation days since she has worked for Acxa so I don’t blame her for wanting to take this extra time off, especially since I know Acxa will work her to the bone when she returns to work and won’t make any exceptions for something as trivial as, oh, I don’t know, eye-surgery?