And the "Eyes" have it...

What a month this has been! I wrote last about my awesome new job and how well it was going. Well 3 weeks into the new job things went all upside down and backward! My job is still great...I just havent been to work in the past month due to emergency eye surgery that I had to have on Valentine's Day!

My parents had come into town for the weekend to see the kids. We hadn't seen them since Christmas, so we had done some catching up and fun stuff over the weekend. With my new work schedule, my parents come in on Friday and were going to leave on Tuesday to spend my day off with me on Monday. I had a routine eye exam scheduled late Monday afternoon to get my contact prescription renewed. I had asked my parents to pick Joshua up from school and I would get Lily on the way home from my appointment. Well, that never happened.

I am VERY thankful to have a thorough optometrist. She has and recommends a retinal scan once a year. I am horribly near sighted and have been since puberty. My contact prescription has been the same for the past three years though. I have also had a small flash of light that would go off in my right eye from time to time but every time they dilated my eyes and did the scan it was normal. I had been told that due to the degree of correction needed on my eyes, that this would happen and we would monitor it. My scan came back looking vastly different on my right eye this time, and they sent me directly to a retinal specialist that evening. I had surgery first thing the next morning.

Apparently I had been living with a partial retinal detachment in my right eye for about 4-6 months. I didn't have any pain or loss of vision. Everything seemed to be fine in that eye. In fact, with my contacts in my vision was 20/20. The shape of my eyes makes my retina very thin and it tore a small hole in one spot. It had been there long enough that I had accumulated fluid under my retina and that was causing more of it to detach. Long story short, they had to put a band around my eye to relieve some of the pressure on the thin retinal tissues, then made incisions and drained all the vitreous out so they could laser my retina back into place. After all that, they placed a large bubble of gas in my eye to hold everything in place until the lasering could scar in. Some fluid was left under my retina because it was very gel like and they would have caused more damage to get it all out. The first two days post op, I had to lay or sit face down. I am NOT a stomach sleeper and this was tough! We rented a chair with a bed attachment to help out (think massage chair minus the masseuse) and it proved to be a life saver. After the first two days, I had to lay on my left side exclusively. I had to sleep with pillows behind me so I wouldn't roll over and the whole nine yards. After two weeks, the main area where the tear was had healed beautifully but I had an area on the left that hadn't healed due to the fluid that they had to leave under the retina at the time of surgery. This area needed to be relasered and they could do that in office. Sounds easy, right? Not so much! I had to have a shot IN MY EYE. I still cringe at the thought. Oh the HORROR of it all. I have never expected to dab my eyes and come back with blood on the kleenex but that's what I got for about 20 minutes after the injection. The lasering itself was uncomfortable to. It felt like pulsing bursts of a really bad migraine coming on and everything was a hideous shade of neon pink for 15 minutes after they finished. I then had to lay on my right side for 10 days for that to scar in.

I was finally released to be up and moving on Monday (almost 1 month after my original surgery). I still have the gas bubble in my eye and cant' see very well. It is shrinking, so at the moment I have a line through the middle of my vision. With glasses on, I can see some detail above the line. Below the line, it's like looking through thick aquarium glass. It bothers me to walk in crowds because I can't really see anyone coming up on my right side. Night vision is also off due to the glare and odd reflection of lights off the bubble. I can't even really describe what I see and don't see at this time. The gas bubble should be gone in another 4 weeks or so and then I can be fitted with a new contact prescription for that eye. They're not done with me yet, though. Since they took all the vitreous humor out of my eye, I have a cataract forming on the lens. So in 3 -4 months I get to have cataract surgery at the age of 34. They are planning on burning my prescription into the new lens so my vision will be corrected for the most part. I think Lasik would have been easier! The important thing is, they saved my vision! I was perilously close to losing it based on what the surgeon has told me. SCARY!! It's a Valentine's Day I will never forget....