Tuesday, December 20, 2011

My Eyes - As promised. . .

When I was 14, an eye doctor mentioned to me once that I had strange retinas.  I had no idea what that meant, but neglected my eyes for years after that.  When I started working at Wabash, I went to a local optometrist, and he told me I had histoplasmosis in my eyes pretty bad.  He explained to me that while it was laying dormant, that it could flare up at any time and render me virtually blind.
Check this out here http://www.nei.nih.gov/health/histoplasmosis/histoplasmosis.asp#1 for more details.  My optometrist recommended an ophthalmology for a second opinion on what was happening in my eyes. So my first visit to Lafayette Eye Center followed.
At my first visit with Dr. David Magnante (he's cool, if you know who I'm talking about), he left the room after saying "Wow!" and came back with another doctor to show him "How cool my eyes were"...Okay so, NO ONE wants to hear when they go to a specialist that they have something "cool" - most generally this means it's new to them or something unusual.  He told me that day that I have a form of retinal deterioration that causes holes and in my retina, and while "yes" I do have histoplasmosis, this was no where as concerning as the holes and how they could detach my retina.  This was the first definition "You're retinas are full of craters"  apparently a few of the holes had a lot of fluid behind them and I needed to have an emergency procedure done with lasers to correct it.  So my first visit there, I had two head ensuing laser treatments.  What they do during these procedures, is strap your head into a contraption where you can't move (chin on a chin rest with laser machine in front of you), they give you some numbing drops in your eyes and shoot a green laser straight into your eye through a lense that they place directly on your eyeball.
I had many follow up visits and a LOT of those treatments.
Pretty soon (three years later or so), Dr. Magnante moved to Unity and I went to see him up there for one of my regular visits.  That day, Dr. Magnante had Dr. Gary Schraut in his office for a visit also.  It was then another show and tell moment for me, when they both talked about again "how cool" my eyes were.  So, I became a patient of Dr. Schraut.  He is actual a retina specialist at the Retina Clinic in Lafayette.  (I've noticed that besides me, he only sees old patients- guess most people don't have these issues this young)  On one of my normal visits to Dr. Schraut, he decided it would be best to just laser around my whole eye.
If you are squeamish to my story at all so far, you may want to stop reading now.  So this day I went to see him and he explained to me that there were a lot of holes and he was tired of treating them individually, plus there was one hole in particular that was in a really hard to reach place with the laser.  He explained to me that he would have to freeze this particular hole, and in order to do all of this he would need to put my eye to sleep.  Guess how they do that?  Ok, so they give you a shot with a HUGE needle that is "dull by design" in the back of your eye nerve.  In order to get to your eye nerve they must stick the needle up under your eye and all the way to the back.  Yeah that's right, and you ask, is this painful?  Okay well, I say to that, I would rather have a few more children then EVER do that again.  What even made this horribly worse, was that I had to do it a second time a few weeks later for the other eye.  When the "dull needle" passes through gristley parts of underneath your eye, it crunches in your head....oh it's making me cringe just recalling it.
Anyway, so, he didn't explain to me that freezing your eye..means to touch your eye with liquid nitrogen which  even though your eye is totally asleep meaning you can't open it at all, gives you a frozen headache worse than you can EVER imagine.  Also the healing time on that eye was like 4 days.  It looked horrible and infected.
Okay..the cool thing about the eye asleep shot, is as your eye is waking back up, you can look in a direction and the other eye slowly scans the room.  VERY creepy, but it was pretty funny.  Zach made tons of fun of his Momma.
I think I pretty well covered it.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, my parents should not have had children, their genes did not mix well.  At least not with me; my bro is pretty okay tho.

1 comment:

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