General Chat

All is very very well with him, thanks for asking! He is testing and adjusting and has bought a box of patches, with a start date of Saturday. Looks like I'll be joining that party.

Me, I just got back from the retinal surgeon, still not seeing the monitor too well. ;)

Surgery in September (hopefully there will have been an election by then) to correct the botched cataract surgery two years ago. Replace the mis-placed lens (which refracts light and causes double vision and irritation and pain), a vitrectomy (removal of all the vitreous fluid in the eye) to clear out all the crap inside my eye, and probably removal of scar tissue on retina depending on how bad it looks once they're in there. What jolly fun. I'll still have the glaucoma in that eye, probably caused by the steroids used to counteract the swelling on the macula caused by the debris in the eye ...

But hey, it ain't cancer!

I would class the trouble with your eye as on a par with cancer. Sight is SO precious.

Absolutely, Jean. I work with my eyes, not to mention playing with my eyes. I'm a completely visual person - music isn't my thing, visual art is; tell me something and I'll forget it before you're finished, write it down for me and I'll remember it forever.

Amazing, though, what you can get used to -- the way my eye is now, I'd have thought before it happened that it would make me suicidal, but you just get on.

The good thing is that I'm assured that this surgery will fix everything (except the glaucoma, for which there are the drugs) -- no more weird lens effects, no more pain/irritation, no more floating globs (which also scare me silly sometimes, thinking I've seen something moving out of the corner of my eye), no more filmy effect (the doc described it as saran wrap, and it is - that's the scarring on the retina, apparently). It beats cancer that way, anyhow!

Wow Janey


That sounds horrible .......... but great news that they can do something to correct it.



I had cataracts removed from both eyes in 2001, 6 weeks apart (supposed to be 4-5 months wait between them, but my surgeon played the system and succeeded). I'm lucky .... all went well, and I now have long sight after being so short sighted that I had "coke bottle" lenses.


In fact, I had to learn to "see" again in one way, because I can't see things that are very close to me ................. even with reading glasses I can't see as clearly to take out a splinter (for example) as I used to be able to see by taking off the old glasses!



Good to hear the other half is behaving.

I headed that off with mine -- blind as a bat for distance since I was 8, so figured the cataracts were my chance to go bionic and be able to see specks of dust at 20 paces. Had the first eye done, and realized what I'd done -- I knew I needed glasses for reading, glasses for computer, glasses for TV and glasses for driving already -- so what made me think it would be any different with a new lens than it was with contact lenses?

I realized I could live being unable to get out of bed without glasses lest I crash into furniture, having done it all my life ... but I could not live without being able to read without glasses. The thought of being somewhere where my glasses weren't and being unable to see print on a page terrified me. So I had the other eye (the bad one now) 'set' for reading distance. People had suggested that to me, and I'd thought ew, weird, but it works. ;)