Having lasers shot into your eye sounds very cool. And, if it's keeping you from losing (more) of your eyesight, it most definitely is.
But not as cool as shooting lasers out of your eyes, surely.
As of today, it looks like I may be done with lasers for a while. The latest imaging shows that the intentional laser damage is scarring over nicely. This will hopefully keep my retina from shredding apart any further. All the green dots in this photo along the top are where lasers burned holes in my eye...
Now it's just a matter of time until I find out how much of my eyesight will come back. The hope is that once the blood which has settled at the bottom is absorbed and all the tissue which exploded has either disintegrated (or my brain learns to ignore it) that I'll be kinda-sorta-mostly visually normal. Whatever that is.
Until then, I see like this...
Which, as you can imagine, is headache-inducing because the spots and blurry bits are always moving around.
It's best if I don't wear my eyepatch so my brain can get a handle on how things are and try to adapt a bit... but it's sometimes easier if I wear it for a while so my head doesn't split open.
In other news, if I ever start a band, it's definitely going to be called Intentional Laser Damage.
I've had three wasp nest encounters.
The first was at my mom's apartment where I saw a massive nest had been built under her balcony eave. I hated the idea of mass murdering them, but I hated the idea of my mom getting attacked more, so I opened the sliding door a crack, soaked the nest with RAID Wasp Nest Killer, waited a bit, then got a shovel to fling the soaking mass into the field behind the building.
The second was the first Summer after I moved into my home. Wasps had built a small nest outside my bedroom on the second floor. They didn't bother anybody, so I just left it there. I assume that wasps perform some necessary function in nature, so I let them be.
The third time they started building a nest under my front porch. There was absolutely no way I could have them attacking people coming to my home (including me!), so I once again bought a can of wasp killer and tried to kill them while the nest was still under construction and small so the murders would be minimized.
Remember my fuzzy spider roommate I talked about yesterday?
Well now I have three wasps living on my security camera...
It's a NEST camera. And so I guess the wasps decided it was an advertisement to build a new nest there.
I sure hope not.
I went outside to shoo them away, but then I felt it started raining, so I let them be. Maybe they were just hiding from raindrops and not building a NEST nest after all?
I hope so. I really don't want to have to murder any creatures this week.
There’s a tiny fuzzy spider that lives in my bedroom. He’s never bothered me, so I’ve just let him be.
Once I found him on my bed, but I just shooed him off. I’ve had to rescue him from Jenny twice, which had me worried that she would eat him and throw up everywhere, but he always comes through.
For some reason he is most active in the mornings which is when I usually see him. It’s safer at night, but I have never seen him climbing a wall or anything after the sun goes down.
But then... this morning I got out of bed to feed the cats, and nearly fell trying to avoid stepping on him. It’s a miracle I even saw him he’s so small. It’s only because he was moving that I was able to spot him.
And so... I finally took him outside, where hopefully he’ll be safer and not get stepped on. Here is a photo I snapped before I caught him where he is looking directly at me...
I feel bad that I kicked him out of the house... but less bad than if Jenny ate him out I ended up with his guts on the bottom of my feet.
Good luck, little buddy.
I have been plugging away on a project at work for nearly six months. It's not so much a difficult assignment as one which is highly complex with a lot of confusing parts. And since I've always got a dozen things going on, sorting through those parts is always getting put on the back burner. Until there was no time left. With a deadline looming, I worked all through the night... reading staggering amounts of documentation and plugging numbers into a spreadsheet in an attempt to understand it all.
And this morning at 2:37am, I finally got a handle on it all.
No idea how I'm going to stay awake tomorrow, but I'm too relieved to worry about it right now.
After nearly two weeks of eye trauma spoiling my plans, I decided to head over the mountains to hang out with friends and forget about the day-to-day grind for a while.
The drive over was mostly a good one.
I still can't wrap my head around three things...
All that being said... it could have been worse. I could have been going East instead of West. The traffic heading East was insane. Just a massive line for miles and miles. If I were in the middle of that, I'd have to ask myself if the weekender trip was even worth it.
Maybe it's because I am a homebody at heart now-a-days... but for me the answer would be "no."
It was a rough night. According to my Apple Watch I only got 4-1/2 hours of sleep. I think I kept touching my eye or rolling on it which woke me up.
And when my alarm went off this morning, I was in quite a lot of pain. It feels like I've been punched in the eye. Except I wasn't. My doctor had to press on my eye hard enough to squeeze the liquid out from under my first surgery so he could try and better contain the tear on my retina so it doesn't spread and detach. A half hour of somebody poking your eye out don't feel great once the anesthesia they shoot into it wears off.
My cats must have sensed something was wrong, because I found them next to me whenever I woke up...
BUT THAT WASN'T ALL THE PAIN I GOT THIS MORNING!
This was waiting for me in my email in-box...
This is “health insurance” in America.
One health problem has me hitting 75% of my full-price, high deductible... and this doesn’t even include my much more intensive second surgery yet.
The cost for all this will be thousands upon thousands of dollars. It will easily wipe out my health savings account and likely wipe out my regular savings as well. And this is for one eye. Can you imagine if it were something far worse?
I’m just thankful that I have savings to draw from. And, believe it or not, I consider myself lucky to have insurance... because I might not have even been able to afford to go to the doctor in the first place if I didn’t.
Americans are paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for insurance which results in thousands upon thousands of dollars in medical bills.
This is fucking insanity.
Yet politicians who were bought by the insurance lobby tell us we have the best health care in the world.
Why aren’t Americans sick of this fucking scam yet?
Last week I had me some laser eye surgery in order to try and halt a tear in my retina before it ripped through completely. It went fine, my surgeon was great, and I walked away thinking that I'd be okay for a while... until the next time.
Which, as it turns out, was today.
And this time was SO much more painful.
Especially once the anesthesia wore off and I can feel where he jabbed me with the syringe multiple times... and where he had to push on my eye in order to force liquid out from under my previous surgery so he could super-laser it again... and where the laser burned my retina.
I have a high pain tolerance because I'm an alpha male like that, but still had to tap out at least five times because I needed a minute. Not just from having my eyeball pushed into my skull and the burning of my retina, but from the light so my surgeon could see inside... not to mention the laser itself.
But anyway...
THE GOOD: I'm alive, my vision will mostly return, and my surgeon was happy with how things went.
THE BAD: It will take weeks to months for my vision to mostly return... that second tear they found had to be dealt with which prolonged everything... and ... this likely isn't over. It's only a matter of time before I have to go again.
CONTRAST ENHANCE...
In other good news, my third doctor was just as awesome as my previous two. And he appreciated that humor is my coping mechanism. On top of the laser was protective eyewear, and I asked him to give me a pair because I didn't want the laser to accidentally blind me...
This might have been too much for him. But, hey, I was getting crap injected in my eye and having lasers burning my retina. I could have started screaming!
After I was set free I had to take a nap in my car in the parking lot after, but ended up throwing on two pair of sunglasses so I could drive home.
Along the way I had a disastrous visit to McDonald's which I'll talk about tomorrow.
And once I got home, I passed out on the couch.
And here I am. Feeling like I got punched in the eye and there's blurry spots everywhere.
Overall this was not a good time. Do not recommend. Unless you're going to lose an eye... then you probably want to put on your big boy pants and get it done.
Today was the follow-up to the surgery of my surgery. It went fine. Some fluid build-up under my surgical scar, but it would likely resolve itself. I drove home thinking that I was good for a few more years at least.
Turns out I was off by a few years.
After I got home from work I received a phone call from my surgeon saying that he consulted with another surgeon who spotted another tear on my retina. It was smaller, but should be taken care of. He then told me that the second surgeon also wanted to reinforce the surgery I just had given this new information.
I asked when I could be scheduled.
He said "Can you be here at 11 tomorrow?
When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was my View-Master.
In an age before videotapes, DVDs, on-demand programming, and personal computers, it was a way to watch my favorite shows and movies... and travel the world... when such activities were impossible for me.
Last night while I was working I turned on YouTube and ran across this cool video on View-Master which is worth sharing. Especially if you're familiar with the device...
Pretty amazing, right? It opened a new world for an entire generation.
My eye is still feeling a bit bruised after surgery, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that it's like I've been punched in the eye. Not from pain, but from swelling on my lower lid... even though there's no swelling. Instead it's more like a haze along the bottom (because the tear was at the top and things get reversed in your eye... our brains switch things right-side up).
Eventually my brain will be able to eliminate the haze at the bottom from the top and the chunk floating at the top from the bottom. At least I hope so.
It's tiring having to concentrate all day long to see... though, oddly enough, it's difficult to actually fall asleep. And so I've been falling asleep to my Disney movie collection each night. Last night was The Rescuers and tonight I'm watching The Emperor's New Groove...
This is a criminally underrated movie.
Especially since it features Eartha Kitt's delightful villain, Yzma, who steals the film at every turn...
The rumor is that the big coaster in "Villains Land" has been re-imagined to be an Yzma coaster. I sure hope that's true, because I can't imagine a better source material for an attraction.
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