What’s This Eye Surgery Business

Seems my passing reference to eye surgery in yesterday’s happy birthday to the blog post didn’t go unnoticed. Nice to see that folks are paying attention. So since people are asking about it, I should probably explain. I’ll let one of the comments I left over there do some of the heavy lifting for me.

When I was little, they noticed a small cataract on my left eye. It wasn’t worth bothering with because it wasn’t harming anything and it wouldn’t really be worth removing especially the way surgery like that was at the time. But they told me that as I got older it might get bigger and maybe be a problem. Well…it’s bigger now, and sometimes that eye gets really sensitive/watery/just sort of strange. I had an appointment a couple of weeks ago to get it looked at, and it’s starting to expand into different parts of my eye. So tomorrow I’m seeing a specialist and from there we’re going to decide if it’s time to clean everything up. I’m betting on yes. It’ll be kind of nice to have 2 blue eyes again instead of 1 blue one and a greyish cloudy one and it’ll be cool to know my eye isn’t going to become deformed or explode or anything ridiculous, but who looks forward to surgery, right?

So tomorrow has become today and the appointment has come and gone. And much like some of my baseball predictions (Rays, Pirates and possibly Dodgers, I’m looking in your direction), yes was not a good bet.

Long story short, the doctor is reluctant to go in and do anything unless it’s absolutely necessary because there are some complicated things going on in there and it may ultimately cause more discomfort than it cures. the eye feels good most of the time, so it’s probably best to leave well enough alone for as long as we can, he figures. As long as my eye won’t be blowing up or doing other doubtlessly painful things, I’m fine with this.

And this might make Brother Brad laugh. the guy even used the word “spew,” as in “I imagine opening that thing up and having the whole contents of the eye spew everywhere.” That sounded like a very Braddish thing to say, and it was even funnier because the specialist’s name is Brad.

To confirm that he’s right, he’s sending me for an ultrasound on both eyes in a couple of weeks. How do you ultrasound eyes? I’ve never heard of that, nor had Carin when I told her what the plan was.

So that’s where we are. Once he has a chance to look at the results things could change, but for now it looks like there’s no surgery on the horizon for me.

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9 Comments

  1. I looked it up…cause I’m weird…and it sounds not too bad. I guess they numb the eye and then press this doo dad against the lid while it’s closed so they can see in weird and wacky places that are hard to get to. But then this one place said if you’re getting your type of ultrasound done, they might ask you to look in various directions. Hope they don’t expect you to be able to do that.

    1. Or if they do expect me to do that that they’ll settle for turning my head, because I physically can’t move my eyes. They do that all by themselves and I have no control over where they go.

      Wow, you’re on the ball. that post has only been up for like 10 minutes. I was going to look that up too, but you beat me. Slow day at the office for once?

      1. I looked it up after you emailed me…just cause I couldn’t figure out how in the good sweet holy crap you would ultrasound an eye. That, and I was about sick of messing with HandsOnTable. If I could get my hands on the guy who built that thing…rar.

          1. It’s this thing on the web that allows you to build a table/do excel-like things with it. Thing is I can’t figure out how. at all. and I’m not alone. And we want to build it into one of our tools. Yarg!

            Yeah that kinda sounds like what I read about that b scan thing.

  2. Good luck with all this, Steve. I had an eye ultrasound for the first time (that I can remember) earlier this year, and – geek that I am – I thought it was kind of neat. I had it done for a similar reason; my surgeon wanted to get a better idea just how messed up my left eye really is before she went poking around in there. She had me lay back in a reclining chair and close my eyes. Then she smeared my eyelids with some thick, cold jelly stuff, and then she ran the little probe thing all over them – asking me to move my eyes one direction or another if I could, to help her get a good look at everything. The ultrasound probably took a little longer with me than the average person, just because I couldn’t hold most of the eye positions she asked for. But the whole thing was relatively quick and mostly painless.

    1. Thanks for the description. Sounds like I could be in for an interesting day. Interesting because I’m sure it’ll be kind of neat but also because my jiggly eyes might give these people fits. Glad to hear it’s a mostly painless experience. I’m sure it can’t help but be a wee bit uncomfortable, but I can probably handle that.

  3. Ugh not to be a gloomy little raincloud but I hope that they’ve changed ocular ultrasound technique or something in the past 10+ years because when I had one it was a very miserable experience…. Though for me, they numbed my eye and then held the lids open, dribbled some vaseline like goo on it then ran the ultrasound probe across the surface of my eye. And my technition was a newbie and they would get distracted and get kind of heavy handed. At least they had a fluffy white cat stuffed animal for the victums to squeeze and mangle while going through this…. I was aching for days after.

    Having your eye closed for it would make a huge difference I imagine though as I’m sure a lot of the pain was caused by your body naturally taking offense to having something rubbing your eye and not being able to close it/pull away.

    1. So let me get this straight. You don’t comment in forever and then show up and tell me *that*? Thanks. Thanks a lot. Lol.

      Hopefully, since I’m having this done at a place full of people who know their way around eyes, it won’t be so bad. And if they tell me that hey this is Bob and this is his first time, I might just take your advice and run like the wind. I’ll likely bump into a bunch of shit on my way out, but if you’re telling me the truth it’ll hurt a lot less than the alternative.

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