Month: March 2020

Post-surgery Day

Now about Wednesday. I already had some vision in the right eye even before I went to bed, and in the morning, I’ve realized it is now the same as in the left eye, maybe slightly better. The eye overall felt tons better than the first one after the surgery. I do not know what the surgeon did wrong the first time, and I am not going to try to find out:)


I had a follow-up in the morning, Vlad got into really bad traffic, and was late. But since now he is an excellent planner, we still arrived virtually on time. This time we didn’t have to wait for the doctor. My eyes were checked, and the right one appeared to be the same about -2.75.
Although this time, the surgeon sat with me and asked what questions I had, it didn’t feel like he was interested in me. I asked all I needed to confirm (eyes dryness, when I can resume my training, makeup, etc.) I will have a follow-up with him in three months, and the retina doctor follow up in four months, and endless visits with my eye doctor to finalize my prescription (which might take 4-5 more weeks)

I needed to take my mom to the same eye doctor for her annual, and I figured out I will make her appointment on the same day since Vlad will be there anyway. So when I realized I would need to adjust my glasses for the right eye, I called my doctor. They said they are booked 100% until Tuesday, “but let’s see what the doctor will say.” I also called the Lenzcrafters to see whether their lab person will be in, but they said he is in on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday only. Which meant I wouldn’t be able to get glasses that day.

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More Details on the Second Eye Surgery

Once again, tons of details, mostly for my real-life friends.

Probably the worst thing about these eye surgeries so far was these four days before the second surgery when I had to take my right contact lense out. I asked my doctor whether it will make any sense to take out one of my -14 lenses and put my -2.75 in the left eye, and she shook her head and said I wouldn’t be able to see anything. So I had to survive with one eye.

For some reason, when I was talking to the clinic staff in the fall, I believed them when they told me that I would be fine with one eye for two weeks “because people use one eye most of the time anyway.” I should have been skeptical since by then, I already knew they do not understand the severity of my situation, but for some reason, I believed them.

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Second Eye Surgery

On Tuesday, I had my second (right) eye operated. This time my surgery was very early in the day (we had to be there at 8-15 AM) and overall went much better than the first one. Since I mentioned to Vlad that I’d experienced some pain during the first surgery (and the only reason I’ve said it was because of my known high pain tolerance level), Vlad made sure everybody knew about that. He mentioned it to each of the nurses who appeared by me, and to the surgeon. They ave me more local anesthesia, and not only ai had virtually no pain at that time, but I also had fewer effects when it started to wear off in the afternoon.


The fog started to disappear earlier, and I had less “bloody spots” during the first two days.
I ended up being again about -3, which was expected, even with the different lens types.
That was after the surgery that we had ice-cream instead of lunch, and I got more treats from Vlad today.

This morning I realized that the surgeon’s mark was still on my forehead 🙂

Sweet Stopover

Yesterday, I had my second cataract surgery. I think it went somewhat better than the first one, but I will share more details after today’s follow up.

That time, the surgery was earlier in the day, we were supposed to show up at 8-15AM. And when we were going back, it was almost lunch time. I suggested we will go out, just because we haven’t done so for a while. We tried a couple of places on Palatine, but there was nothing we really liked.

So we decided to do what I actually do sometimes, and looks like Vlad does sometimes as well: having ice-cream for lunch and instead of lunch 🙂

Both of us had affogato, I had int with coffee ice-cream, and Vlad – with vanilla (only mine is shown), and then Vlad had a scoop of strawberry ice-cream, and I had a blueberry pie one. Two-cource lunch, I’d say 🙂

Yellow Beets and Blue Cheese Salad

I spotted yellow beets in the Eurofresh store last week. Previously, I only saw yellow beets in my CSA shares. Even though I didn’t plan to cook anything with beets that week, I bought a bunch.

I baked the beets in foil (40-50 min at 400F) and made this simple salad:

Baby kale, baked beets, blue cheese, pistachios. Dressing: one part of pistachio oil, to parts of Madera balsamic. It feels like a holiday meal :}

Happy and Healthy Unions

I started to write this post yesterday, but when I reached out to Grandfather Google for the exact link, the first thing I saw was Pete Buttigieg announcing that he is dropping out of the race. He was my choice, and with Illinois primaries being so close, I felt incredibly upset and could not bring myself to write this post. 

This morning, I decided it is still worth writing. 

I saw this article published in Tribune last week, and though it was related to Pete Buttigieg, I had similar observations for a long time. Because of Vlad, I had multiple chances to observe not only his relationships but also many other same-sex couples. And I could not agree more with what this article is stating. When people try to tell me something about gender roles in families, and what is “more natural” for a specific gender, I always ask: and what about same-sex couples? I’ve observed it so many times – the fluid roles when it all depends on how busy each of the partners is, who is more stressed or who is sick, who is better in doing particular things. 

Gay and lesbian couples, Coontz found, tend to approach conflicts with more humor and affection, spend less time criticizing and lecturing each other and offer each other more praise and encouragement, compared with their heterosexual counterparts.

“As a marriage historian,” Coontz told me, “it seems to me we’re totally entering uncharted territory. Never before in history have we tried to do marriage in a way that is totally free from dictation by our biology — whether we can or can’t have babies; whether we have to have babies — or by legal assignments that only husbands can do this and only wives can do that. It’s the first time we’ve really tried to build marriages that were not laid out for us by law and hundreds of years of customs.”

Mary Altaffer

I believe that what is emerging now is how our future unions will look like. Indeed, happy and healthy unions.

Getting the First Job After College in the Soviet Union

This is the last post related to the story of higher education in the Soviet Union: how graduates would land on their first jobs.

Since it was happening in the Soviet Union, all colleges and universities were state schools, and there was no concept of the private educational establishment. I’ve already mentioned that the cost of education was zero, which did not mean that students’ life was easy. But there was still a price student had to pay upon graduation. This price was called “a distribution of specialists” or simply “a distribution.”

The Soviet Union had a “planned economy.” That meant that the government planned ahead how much of everything had to be produced in any given year, including the number of graduates of all educational establishments. And all employers: manufacturing plants, research institutions, Department of Defence, schools, hospitals, etc. had to plan how many graduates they need to fill in their positions. Since the Soviet Union did not follow the same educational standards as the rest of the world, we did not have Bachelors’s and Masters’s; everybody had to study for five years (some professions – longer). And everybody would graduate as “specialist,” not B.S. or B.A. or M.S.

The graduates were called “young specialists,” and a couple of months before graduation, they had to be “distributed.” The organizations which wanted to hire somebody had to place their requests with an educational institution. In my case, it was the Leningrad State University. There were about 300 students who would graduate the same year as me from the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics. The University would accept about 300 requests for young specialists, including those who could continue their studies as post-grad students, and including those who will become TAs in the University. 

All students were ordered by class rank, and on the day when the distribution commission was held, they were called into the room in their rank order. 

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