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Road to Retinal Recovery: Week One

As mentioned in a prior entry, I had suffered a detatcherd retina in my right eye due in part to being born premature and in part aggrivated by cateracts surgery. Basically bad luck and weighted dice causing my right eye to go poorly. Surgery itself was honestly pretty smooth according to the doctor, though it helps they had a surgeon on staff that specialized in infants (which my eyes mostly tracked with in spite of the obvious age diffrence.) Surgery went smooth, in spite of my fears (yes it's ok to laugh,) and then the even better news at a relatively short recovery period.

See, I had to have a vitrectomy. That is to say a portion of the fluid inside my eye was taken out as it was pulling on my retina and had gotten behind and started seperating the layers of the retina. So that fluid is removed, lasers are used, and a gas is pumped in to hold the retina in place while it heals. to the surgery going smoothly and the nature of the hole needing to be fixed I only had to be face down for three days. I could get up in that time for fifteenish minutes every hour or so, but I was encouraged to keep my face pointed down. Other people have had to go several weeks up to a couple months fully face down.

THe next three days i was encouraged to stay either face down or on my opposing side. Annoying, but less so. Also I was at home for all this and due to the relative shortness of this recovery period I hadn't rented any equipment ot help with positioning.

I am officially in the second week of recovery now. While I can't do any heavy lifting, operating machinery, and I have to basically keep from jiggling the bubble too much, I can be up and about. The retina itself seems to be reattached, eye pressure looks good, and so it's mostly waiting for the bubble to dissipate before I move on to the next phase.

I suspect once the bubble is gone i can go back to normal activity in full. However my vision won't be at it's 'final' state even then because... Honestly i don't know why it takes so long after the bubble leaves but it can take up to a year for vision to stabilize. I don't know if the waveyness and unable to read text will still be a thing as I am currentlylooking through a gas bubble, but I'm not seeing any major jaggedness in the wave of the bubble. So I want to hope everything will turn out.

Probably won't see the stars after this, which bums me out. I could see 'em again for a month between cateracts surgery and this. at least I had that.

Some things for anyone else to kep in mind if they are going throug ha vitrectomy:

Follow your doctor's instructions on positioning. I got told to be face down. Other people are stuck on their side. Some people areeven stuck face up at an angle. Every eye and every injury is it's own thing so just because I ended up face down does not mean you will. The positioning guidelines are there to maxamize your chances at healing properly.

Double check with your doctor on if you can use a tablet while you are down. Even if you're mostly listening to podcasts the fact there is some amount of entertainment is a great help, since otherwise you're sorta stuck in your own head for the recovery period outside of when you can get up.

You will see strobing pulsing blobs. This is the air bubble kinda pressing against everything. In my case it looked like a lava lamp a majority of the time, but there was alsothis firefly effect of dozens of little pinprick lights. This is, at least in my case, normal right after surgery. You will have just had a fairly extensive and invasive eye proceedure done. Don't freak out. Do bring it up with your doctor on the day after followup just to make sure. It should mostly go away within a week or so (at least in my case then again I lucked out on recovery timne.) Just make sure to keep a mental note about it and bring it up with your doctor.

In fact I am going to make a seperate note. Don't be afraid to bring little details up with your doctor. This is not the time to be macho. This is not the time to 'tough it out.' This is when you should be on the lookout for changes and be communicative. With that said? If you bring your concerns up and your doctor says it's OK? Even if gut level you arne't sure, back off. This is a specialist and they are taking your concerns seriously, so when they have a look and see everything is fone? try to have a little faith and relax.

That's been week one for me. While technically I can use the computer, my left eye's vision is pretty well not great to begin with and I'd rather not overdo things since i don't have to look at a screen for a paycheck.

These have been my experiances. If you end up reading this because you are about to, or have recently gone through, retinal surgery. I wish you a speedy recovery.

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Gemlog

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