Eye surgery
9:36AM on March 02, 2011
For the most part many of you do not know this but I am legally blind. Well... I was. I was born with really, really bad vision.... I do not remember the exact numbers but for 25 years of my life when I looked out at the world it was blurry and very muted. If you hold up a sheet of wax paper and look through it... that is close to what I could see for most of my life.
The year I turned 25 I discovered technology that could perhaps help me. I had a lot of consultations with eye specialists all over the world. They all told me that if anyone could help me (we will call him Sam) Sam could. So I made the appointment with him in his London office. Several days worth of testing later... he and I had coem up with a way to fix my eyes that we could both live with. He was willing to do the surgery and I could live with the consequences if it all went wrong.
And so my year of surgeries began. I have lenses inplanted both above and below my iris... and then a laser surgery on top of that all to fine tune my vision. When all was said and done (12 surgeries later... 6 on each eye and no that doesnt include the other procedures I had to endure to get to the point of being able to have the surgery each time... eyes are tricky like that) I had perfect vision.... my right eye sees 20/25 and my left eye 20/15. I have depth perception... which I had never had in my life. I can see in color that is clean and clear and not fuzzy beyond being able to distinguish one shade of blue from another. It was a new world for me.
For 5 years (almost 6) I have had the wonderful joy of sight. Real sight.
This last Saturday I was working on the computer when a friend of mine walked through my door. I looked up to say hi and felt my left eye "pop". All of a sudden I was seeing doubles and light halos and my vision was very, very blury. I called my local eye Dr and he said he wouldnt even look at it... lol. And so I called Sam's office. The told me to come in Tuesday midday and they would take a look. Sam has multiple offices around the world... he is currently not in the US. Irish drove me to his Boston office (I am so not traveling alone and am not okay to drive) adn his associates did a lot of testing and looking and yuppers... I was right.... the stitches holding the lens in the front of my left eye have snapped. The lens is being held by one stitch (clip) and the rest of it is resting on the bottom of my eye.
The good news is that nothing is damaged internally. The inside of my cornea is not scratched nor is my iris. The not so good news is that I need to hae open eye surgery again to correct the problem. My surgery is scheduled for this Monday (March 7th). I should be just fine (I am in very capable hands) but I have a very limited amount of time I can be on teh computer... and reading, watching tv, my beadwork, quilting along with a lot of other things I love to do are now very restricted until my eye has recovered. My recovery time is expected to be between 3 to 5 weeks total if all goes well (as it should).
Since I will not be working you will find me to be home a good amount of the time. I may not be in my live house chat as much as I used to be but if sent a Rudemail I will respond as soon as I am able.
I am including pictures of my eyes... up close so that you can see what I am talking about. They are not gross or anything. And you can all get a really good look at the actual color of my eyes... they are actually a very pale brown... almost yellow and have a bit of striping to them.
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