A couple weeks ago, despite the laser eye procedure, my retina detached. My vision in that eye was 20/40 when they last clocked it and it was just getting good enough that I could almost read some things with it. Today I have my second eye surgery, which the doctor described thusly: "We'll make cuts in the top and bottom of your eyeball and wrap it with silicon - it'll be like having a rubber band wrapped around your eye. Maybe we'll put a gas bubble in there, too."
I still don’t understand why or how my retina detached - whether it’s related to the blood clot I had in my eye, or a result of the surgery to remove that blood clot. I have almost no vision in my left eye. There’s an area around 10pm in my vision that permits me to detect a bright light source, and. If I wave my fingers right in front of my eye, I can detect that the light is changing. I had a blood clot in my eye because one nasty thing leukemia did to me was dump blood into my eyes, brain, and lungs.
My previous eye surgery wasn't so bad, and I'm no longer taking a medication that used to make me cough, which forced them to cut short my previous surgery sooner than they wanted to.
Due partly to the steroids I’m on right now, I have a very healthy appetite. I eat and eat, and my weight stays the same from week to week. At the moment, my main beef with this surgery is that the doctors want me to go 12 hours without eating, and during that 12 hour period I’m only allowed to drink eight ounces of liquid. It’s only 8:40am, I have a very dry mouth, and when I do drink that eight ounces, I’ll be gulping about nine pills with it.
One thing about looming eye surgery is that I pay more attention than usual to how frequently we use visual metaphors in language. “I see,” “Let’s take a look,” etc. Last night Andrew told me, “See you in the morning!” and I responded with “Rub it in, why don’t you!”
So: I’ll be wearing an eye patch for the next week, taking eye drops for the next week or so. And hopefully I’ll be seeing you soon.
