THE PAIN WAS WORTH IT.

Which experience have you had that was extremely painful, yet it yielded great benefits for you? For me, it was an eye operation that I had on this date in 1995. Previous operations to lower the pressure in my right one didn't help much so I had little hope that this operation would work for long.

My eye trouble started a week previously when my vision fogged up and I saw rainbows around lights. I knew that was the signal that my pressure was high. When I saw my ophthalmologist, Dr. Casey, he fast-tracked me into surgery. Usually, it took, and still takes, months to get a surgery date.

I rode the bus to the University Hospital after lunch on the day of my surgery and waited for my turn in surgery. Wearing that hospital gown while lying on a stretcher in the rotunda made me feel naked. I had heard of overcrowding in hospitals but this was ridiculous. At least we had white sheets hung around us to keep us out of sight from the public.

Instead of a general anesthetic, the doctor gave me a local as well as something to relax me. Even so, the operation hurt like nothing I ever felt in that eye before. As the doctor moved my eyeball to insert a tube, called a bleb, he explained that it would drain the excess fluid out of my eye and it wouldn't seal itself up. Past operations were merely holes cut into my eyeball. The bleb would ensure that I wouldn't need another operation for years. That's what Dr. Casey said as he worked on my right eye.

After what seemed like hours, though it wasn't more than thirty minutes, the torture ended. I lay on the stretcher in the rotunda again until a friend came to drive me home after he left work. Because of a shortage of beds, patients were released as quickly as possible. What a vast difference from when I was a child. I had my cataracts removed when I was four years old and I stayed in hospital for six weeks.

As a result of that bleb insertion back in 1995, I haven't needed any eye drops or pills to control my right eye's Glaucoma. It has remained at the proper level year after year. I'm grateful to Dr. Casey for rushing me into surgery and inserting that bleb. It has preserved what little vision I have left for all these years.

Because How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity was a memoir about God leading me into the light of his truth, I mentioned this operation only in passing. This newly-published memoir is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.