My right eye

I have avoided writing about an issue I’ve had with my right eye that developed earlier this year. I was reminded why this week when my wife, Carissa, for a completely unrelated reason, called me a “whiny bitch.” I have forgiven her and accepted her apology. While she has not formally or publicly acknowledged error or apologized, I've taken the liberty of accepting her implicit apology and offering my forgiveness. I'm over it. Moving on.

The bigger point, though, is that nobody wants to come off as a whiny bitch. I am sensitive to the fact that writing a blog that is mostly about me carries the risk of becoming an exercise in self-indulgent navel-gazing that can border on narcissism. And I am well aware that people have a low tolerance for people who go on and on about their health problems.  I know that is how I feel when you are talking about yours.

Anyway, back to me and my right eye. One Wednesday afternoon back in March, while sitting at my desk at work, I noticed a large “floater” drifting around my eyeball, obscuring my vision. I blinked. It didn’t go away. Usually I will not go to a doctor until I notice something serious. Years ago a spider crawled deep into my ear while I was asleep and from time to time would bite my inner ear. I woke up screaming each time. The pain was intense and I had no idea what caused it. Carissa pleaded with me to go to the emergency room to find out what was happening inside my ear. In my mind, the emergency room is for people who have emergencies. Or else who are pussies. By dawn, after about the tenth cycle of deep inner ear pain, I had progressed to pounding the bedroom wall with my fists while shrieking in pain. I was also a little rough with my pillow. So I finally went to the emergency room where the doctor took a look in my ear, fumbled around for a tiny vacuum, and sucked a small spider out of my ear canal. Five minutes with an emergency room doctor and a lifetime of boring people with a story about the time a spider crawled into my ear while I slept.

The floater in my right eye couldn't be ignored like a sporadic, stabbing pain in my inner ear.  It was big blob that did not go away no matter how many times I blinked, rubbed, or vigorously shook my head. So I went to my optometrist’s office where I was examined and told nothing seemed abnormal, that the floater would likely go away on its own or I’d eventually get used to it. This was not a satisfying answer, but, hey, I’m a lawyer, not a doctor. There's nothing I can do about it then, I asked? Because to me it's big enough to warrant its own address. Call if it gets worse, I was told.

Me the day after surgery.

So I went back to my office. The next day, a Thursday, I noticed a faint pattern of tiny dark spots (like looking through a screen on a window) had joined my floater. I later learned that these were specks of blood suspended in the vitreous fluid behind the lens in my eye. And the floater was a piece of my retinal lining that had torn away from my inner eye. But since I had just been to the optometrist and told nothing was abnormal, I figured maybe the specks had always been there and that now I was just paying better attention. And I didn’t have time to go to the optometrist every day to find out I would need to get used to blobs and specks sloshing around inside my eye.

On Friday night I was at the liquor store picking up a bottle of Irish whiskey (for a friend) and while walking to the checkout, I stumbled over a knee-high display of half-gallon bottles of Jack Daniels stacked on the floor on my right side. Never saw it. No harm to the whiskey (three bottles tumbled onto a carpeted floor without breaking), but stumbling over a display at a liquor store is never a story you are anxious to hurry home from work to share with your family. Saturday I sat in the bleachers at my daughter’s basketball game and tried blinking away the blind spot I could no longer deny had developed in the corner of my right eye. At halftime I called the optometrist and was directed to the weekend on-call eye doctor who upon hearing my symptoms immediately connected me with a retinal surgeon, Dr. Simpson,  who told me to come to his office for an examination right away.

Dr. Simpson's examination discovered  that the floater, the tiny blots, and the blind spot were caused by a detached retina. If you’re interested, here’sa detailed retinal detachment overview.   In a nutshell, the retina is light sensitive lining on the inner eye. The optics of the eye creates a visual image of the world on the retina, which works sort of like the film in a camera, sending signals to the brain.  The center of the eye is filed with vitreous fluid, a gel that thins as we age. As it thins, the chances that the retina will tear or separate from the inner eye increase. This detachment interrupts the retina’s ability to send signals to the brain and the lack of signals from the retina to the brain results in loss of vision.  If the entire retina detaches completely, it falls into the vitreous fluid in the center of year eye and cannot be reattached.  If not completely detached, it is possible to surgically reattach the torn lining to the inner eye and restore vision. 

It's no spider biting your inner ear or anything, but when Dr. Simpson explained that my retina had torn in four places and that I needed immediate surgery or I would go blind, he had my attention. Even with immediate surgery there was no guarantee my vision could be restored fully. This was about three o'clock in the afternoon. By seven that night I was in pre-op being prepped for surgery. Five hours later I was awakening from an anesthetized haze. The surgery was uneventful, at least for me since I was basically taking a long, deep nap. As I understand it, the vitreous fluid was drained from my eye, the four tears in the lining were stitched to the inner eye, and a gas bubble was inserted in place of the vitreous fluid, creating pressure to secure the repaired retina to the inner eye. 

Surgery was only the beginning,  I quickly discovered. What came next is where I might stray into whiny bitch territory but I'll continue the story for next time.