First followup, and all's well
May. 29th, 2010 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xelaHad my first followup this morning. When the doctor (not my surgeon, but a senior resident who'd been tasked to come in on the Saturday of a holiday weekend to do the 1-day followup of Friday's patients) took the shield off, the first thing I said was Wow, I can see you.
She smiled Well that's good.
No - I've been farsighted all my life. I've never seen a person so close so clearly without correction.
She looked over my eye in detail; my incision (2.7 mm - I asked the surgeon while I was still on the table, but I don't think I remembered to mention it here yesterday) is healing by the book, with no leakage. She had me take a fairly cursory eye exam (the first of many, I'm sure); I believe I did slightly better than on recent tests of my former left eye. Unsurprisingly, a new lens did not magically cure my atrophied-since-toddlerhood neural interface to the eye, and I still had the phenomenon where for all but the lines of really big characters (the ones so big there are three or fewer characters per line), I can make out that there is an 'A' or a 'Q' or an '8' - and I can probably do that for most (sometimes all) of the characters on the line. But I cannot state with certainty what order they're in (though I can usually say which is at each end). So I walked from MEEI to the T wearing my (until yesterday) current glasses, mostly keeping my left eye closed rather than try to make the poor nearsighted newborn try to make sense of the world through the distortion of my old farsighted eye's progressive bifocal prescription.
I took the T to Porter, and walked (wearing my ~10-year-old single-vision prescription sunglasses, which gave both eyes a somewhat soft-focus but not mind-bendingly distorted view of the universe) to General Optical, where I'd left an old pair of glasses (with my roughly 2004 prescription) o Thursday, asking them to replace the left lens with a clear, no-correction lens. While I was there, I had them do the thing I thought of last night, to turn my (until yesterday) current glasss into a monocle-of-sorts for my right eye. Then I walked home wearing my new/old (2004-right-progressive + new uncorrected left) glasses. It didn't take much of that for me to realize that I should have done more with them before taking them to the optician than put them on, close my left eye, look at the neighbor's roof out my window, and say "yeah, I can get by on this right lens for a month." Turns out I can see things ~5 m or further away through them reasonably well - but for near vision they're useless: I couldn't even read my watch, let alone a book or computer screen. Oops.
So I've spent most of the day wearing my half-glasses monocle. Which is kind of unbalanced and doesn't sit right in front of my eye - so looking through it much gives me a headache, and text starts swimming after 20 min or so. (It's not as bad as it was sitting on the end of my nose, yesterday. But not a whole lot better, either.)
Of course, since I'm now only required to wear the shield in bed, I don't really need a way to have my right eye corrected while wearing the shield over my left. (Though, in perhaps an overabundance of caution, that's what I've been doing most of the day.) So come Tuesday I'll go back to General Optical and ask them to assemble my monocle, right temple, and a clear lens into a new pair of glasses.
Oh well. I'm not going to kick myself too hard for not figuring this all out a priori.
Right: back to walking home. Which I did by way of my pharmacy, to pick up the prescriptions the doctor I saw at MEEI this morning had sent them: THree eye-drops, each to be taken four times a day - and none to be taken within 15 min of any of the others.
I've decided for now (not least because too much small print to just follow orders without understanding, so I'm thinking of the eyedrops as beige cap, pink cap, and grey cap. I have four sets of 20-min-apart appointments in iCal, repeating for for the next 14 days, always in that order (being, pink, grey.... That should keep me on target.
And now, it's time for today's last grey, then to put the shield on and and hope for a good night's sleep.
I want to thank everyone who's been reading this. I can't imagine being all that interested in somebody else's minor medical saga, so I can only feel humble and, with a full heart, grateful to know so may kind and lovely people.
She smiled Well that's good.
No - I've been farsighted all my life. I've never seen a person so close so clearly without correction.
She looked over my eye in detail; my incision (2.7 mm - I asked the surgeon while I was still on the table, but I don't think I remembered to mention it here yesterday) is healing by the book, with no leakage. She had me take a fairly cursory eye exam (the first of many, I'm sure); I believe I did slightly better than on recent tests of my former left eye. Unsurprisingly, a new lens did not magically cure my atrophied-since-toddlerhood neural interface to the eye, and I still had the phenomenon where for all but the lines of really big characters (the ones so big there are three or fewer characters per line), I can make out that there is an 'A' or a 'Q' or an '8' - and I can probably do that for most (sometimes all) of the characters on the line. But I cannot state with certainty what order they're in (though I can usually say which is at each end). So I walked from MEEI to the T wearing my (until yesterday) current glasses, mostly keeping my left eye closed rather than try to make the poor nearsighted newborn try to make sense of the world through the distortion of my old farsighted eye's progressive bifocal prescription.
I took the T to Porter, and walked (wearing my ~10-year-old single-vision prescription sunglasses, which gave both eyes a somewhat soft-focus but not mind-bendingly distorted view of the universe) to General Optical, where I'd left an old pair of glasses (with my roughly 2004 prescription) o Thursday, asking them to replace the left lens with a clear, no-correction lens. While I was there, I had them do the thing I thought of last night, to turn my (until yesterday) current glasss into a monocle-of-sorts for my right eye. Then I walked home wearing my new/old (2004-right-progressive + new uncorrected left) glasses. It didn't take much of that for me to realize that I should have done more with them before taking them to the optician than put them on, close my left eye, look at the neighbor's roof out my window, and say "yeah, I can get by on this right lens for a month." Turns out I can see things ~5 m or further away through them reasonably well - but for near vision they're useless: I couldn't even read my watch, let alone a book or computer screen. Oops.
So I've spent most of the day wearing my half-glasses monocle. Which is kind of unbalanced and doesn't sit right in front of my eye - so looking through it much gives me a headache, and text starts swimming after 20 min or so. (It's not as bad as it was sitting on the end of my nose, yesterday. But not a whole lot better, either.)
Of course, since I'm now only required to wear the shield in bed, I don't really need a way to have my right eye corrected while wearing the shield over my left. (Though, in perhaps an overabundance of caution, that's what I've been doing most of the day.) So come Tuesday I'll go back to General Optical and ask them to assemble my monocle, right temple, and a clear lens into a new pair of glasses.
Oh well. I'm not going to kick myself too hard for not figuring this all out a priori.
Right: back to walking home. Which I did by way of my pharmacy, to pick up the prescriptions the doctor I saw at MEEI this morning had sent them: THree eye-drops, each to be taken four times a day - and none to be taken within 15 min of any of the others.
I've decided for now (not least because too much small print to just follow orders without understanding, so I'm thinking of the eyedrops as beige cap, pink cap, and grey cap. I have four sets of 20-min-apart appointments in iCal, repeating for for the next 14 days, always in that order (being, pink, grey.... That should keep me on target.
And now, it's time for today's last grey, then to put the shield on and and hope for a good night's sleep.
I want to thank everyone who's been reading this. I can't imagine being all that interested in somebody else's minor medical saga, so I can only feel humble and, with a full heart, grateful to know so may kind and lovely people.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 02:35 am (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 06:18 am (UTC)But really neat that your left eye can see better than it has in years, and no complications yet!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 08:00 am (UTC)I'm glad to hear everything is going well, yay!
I dunno if I'm more interested in eye stuff than usual because of my ups and downs with my set or some other reason, but I'm usually fascinated by the differences among people.
I know people who had cataract surgeries separated by several weeks, and then there's my stepmother, who got surgery on both eyes at the same time, went home with the admonition to "take it easy today", went back for the followups and all was fine. Some people got a bandage soft contact lens, some people nothing, you got the full cup. It's all over the map.
One of these days we should talk more about it in person. Either way, did they offer any explanation why your surgeries are so far apart? Also, more often than not they offer the use of a (disposable) contact lens on the eye that is waiting for surgery -- is that contraindicated for you or you just don't like contacts?
Here's hoping for fast recoveries for you!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 11:12 am (UTC)Impatience aside, I approve of this plan.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 10:31 am (UTC)