Reaching 100 days of anything usually sounds like a neat milestone. 100 days of running, 100 days of a new project, 100 days of building a habit. But when those 100 days are measured in recovery from a shattered cornea and emergency intraocular surgery, the number hits a bit differently.
It is strange how time stretches out when my body is quietly rebuilding itself from the inside out. The initial weeks are a blur of clinical precision, drop schedules, and holding my breath against sudden sharp reminders that my eye is fragile. I count days because I have to, tracking the milestones of closing wounds, fading bruising, and finally finishing up weeks of medicated drops.
Yesterday marked day 100.
If someone had told me back in July when this whole thing started that by early November I would be navigating daily life with an aphakic eye, managing the peculiar physics of uncorrected light scatter, and waiting out a rescheduled topography scan because my surgeon caught a bug, I would have wondered how on earth I was going to get through it.
Yet here I am.
The surface of my eye is finally breathing on its own, doing that slow, microscopic work of knitting tissue and sealing the micro-gaps without the chemical bombardment of preserved drops. It brings its own brand of end-of-day tightness and watery protests when the indoor air gets dry, but it is active biology doing what it is designed to do.
Recovery turns out to be a slow exercise in patience. I cannot force the optics to align faster than the biology allows. I gather my data, I wait for the scans, I trust the structural engineering of the secondary lens waiting in the wings, and I accept that good, functional vision does not require perfection, it just requires time.
Day 100 is not the finish line. The scan still needs to happen, the stitches still need to come out, and the secondary lens still needs to find its home. But crossing into triple digits feels like turning a corner. The heavy lifting of the acute trauma is behind me, the roadmap is clear, and the view ahead is steady.