Her voice had the lilt of island speech as she reeled off post-operative instructions before sending me forth, sans cataract.

She was young enough to be my daughter, but I offered a "Yes, Ma'am" after her litany of warnings: No hot tub, (no problem there), no swimming in a chlorinated pool, no heavy lifting or rubbing of the eye. Absolutely, no sleeping without the eye patch for a week and attention paid to 10 eye drops a day.

I zeroed in on her cautionary words, knowing if I messed up, I might be back for a redo.

Besides, my generation has holdover authority fear. In the way back, we believed a permanent record followed you for life. Our school principal loomed large and anyone in a doctor's coat or a priest's collar was on the road to sainthood.

I still suffer from consequence "jitters." A friend stood behind me in a store recently, dropped his voice and said: "You'll have to come with me to Security." It was a joke, but I blanched white, certain I'd been arrested.

Even now, I'm nervous in a doctor's office. Show me a white coat and a blood pressure cuff and my performance anxiety is off the chart. I tell myself this is ridiculous. I like my doctor, but what are ya gonna do?

The removal of a cataract from an aging eye, from any eye, is one of the medical miracles of my lifetime. Waiting on a gurney, I noticed a white board, scheduling surgeries for that morning. My doctor's name was written in red pen every 15 minutes for the next hour and a half.

"How does he catch his breath between cataract procedures," I asked the nurse. "It's not unusual for him to do eight in a day," she said.

After checking in at 6:15 (a.m.), I was back home, crawling into bed for a nap, (eye patch, taped on), by 9:30.

In a big-screen Hollywood production, an injured patient would have a bandage removed from his eyes as his loved one looked on, hopefully. He'd blink in the morning light and cry out: "I can see! I can see!"

An eye with a new lens and a cataract removed may not bring forth that level of drama, but the sense of color, reclaimed, is startling. My right eye, still impaired by a cataract, shows me a world with a golden haze. My left, with a new lens, offers a sky so blue it makes me squint.

Before the cataract lost its place, my off-kilter color sense had been a family joke. When I handed my grandson a green crayon after he requested blue, he asked when I was having my eye fixed.

I did not know my husband's glasses had tinted lens until the day after the cataract was lifted. "How long have your glasses been tinted?" I asked. "Two years," he laughed. Maybe now I am past buying a string of beads I saw as rust-colored. They are watermelon pink, and I won't have to go outside to tell black from navy blue.

There is rarely a down side to surgery, quick, painless and making life better, but a well-meaning forecast can lay down the gauntlet for immediate recovery.

"Most people return to their normal activities the next day," my take-home information reassured.

When my husband drove me to a follow-up appointment with the doctor the afternoon following the cataract procedure, "normal activity" felt as likely as running a marathon.

Sure, the old authority message kicked in, but, I figure, by now, my permanent record has disintegrated. So, I skipped a stop at the grocery store.

Instead, I went home and half-watched, half slept through that old black-and-white movie classic "Casablanca."

I couldn't tell what color Ingrid Bergman's hat was, but I did open one eye to see tears on her face and to watch Humphrey Bogart promise her: "We'll always have Paris."

Judy Elliott is an award-winning columnist from Marietta.