I'm writing this blog to try to help fellow retinal disease patients who are undergoing retinal detachment and repair surgery to gain from my own experience some idea of what one patient experienced as his recovery progressed. I am not a medical professional and this blog is not intended to serve as medical advice or as a substitute for appropriate counsel from a doctor or other licensed professional. I am just one patient and my experiences may not be typical or representative of what other patients can expect. I advise you to consult a licensed and trained medical doctor for medical advice.
Friday afternoon of the first week after surgery I had another follow-up visit with my retina surgeon. Things looked good but my eye pressure was high at about 49. The doctor gave me some diuretic pills to take and asked me to come back in 90 minutes to see if the eye pressure had dropped. It hadn't dropped enough, so the doctor used a needle to remove some fluid from my eye to reduce the pressure. It wasn't painful, though it sounds like it would be. He used some numbing agent drops so I wouldn't feel anything.
He did give me a prescription for the diuretic pills and I took them for two days, but I got some pretty severe abdominal pains. I had to keep getting up to try to clear the pains, which made it hard to keep my positioning as directed, and I had a hard time sleeping. So I stopped taking the pills, hoping that it wouldn't cause a problem with my eye pressure. And I had an appointment with the doctor on Monday morning, so I didn't worry too much.
My Monday morning with the doctor went well. The eye pressure was still low enough, and he said that I didn't need to worry about taking the diuretic any longer. He did reduce one of my drops from four times a day to twice a day, which he said might help with the eye pressure.
My second week of recovery was very much like my first week. I needed to keep up my left side positioning while trying to get decent sleep through Friday afternoon, the 12th day after surgery. I alternated between sleeping in bed and sleeping on the sofa, but neither was completely comfortable, and my left hip and shoulder continued to bother me and keep me from getting really comfortable. I caught up on my lost sleep by napping during the day. I had something to look forward to that kept me excited and positive: I had a chance to do one of my favorite things on Friday night, to preview a new concept luxury electric car at a focus group, and I was really looking forward to it.
My vision in my surgery eye stayed about the same, by which I mean just a big blur, but by the end of the week I was able to see the glare from passing lights when I rode in a car. There was one encouraging change. I had read online that some patients found that they were able to look down through the bubble and see objects or print held a few inches from the eye. I tried it and it worked! I was able to read headlines looking directly down on a newspaper held three inches from my eye.This was pretty exciting for me. This was the first actual object or really anything that I'd seen with that eye since the surgery. I had read that the quality of returning vision after surgery is quite variable and that it is by no means guaranteed. So being able to see something, anything, clearly, even three inches from my eye and through a gas bubble was so reassuring and it gave me reason to be optimistic. Since I had had no other clues yet about how my vision would turn out, this was so encouraging.
Friday afternoon arrived, finally, and I was able to be upright while awake for the first time in two weeks. I still had instructions to sleep lying on my left side for the next three weeks. I got to go to my concept car focus group on Friday night, and I really had a good time. My wife drove and waited while I took part in the focus group. And the next morning, friends stopped by and drove me to one of our electric car group breakfasts and I had a great time with them. Then, that evening, I had a big surprise, and not a positive one.
Saturday night, a holiday party at our kids' house was planned. We arrived about 6 pm and it wasn't long before I got a headache. My vision changed so that I could no longer see my hand held close to my eye when looking straight downward, and even when I looked at lights, I couldn't even see the glare that I was seeing earlier in the evening. I got concerned and the headache wasn't getting any better, so we left early. Surprisingly, half way home the headache went completely away and my vision in that eye, which you wouldn't really call vision, just a blur, returned to what I was used to. It didn't take a genius to realize that since the kids' house was generally uphill from our house, we might well be dealing with an altitude issue!
We went home and checked Google Earth and yes indeed, our kids live at about 1,100 feet elevation! We had listened carefully when the doctor said that I couldn't fly or go to the mountains, but who expects that their family who lives fourteen miles away live at 1,100 feet? The kids live in a normal suburb, not on a mountain.
Anyway, we got back to our own home at elevation 100 feet! And I was feeling completely fine. I did decide to call in and get an appointment with the doctor, just to check and make sure that everything was still okay. And it was fine. The doctor checked my eye pressure, did a visual check on my retina and said it looked good. He did mention, with some humor, that I'm the very first patient he's had who has had an altitude issue with a bubble in the eye, while remaining within the County. He was very surprised. He asked me to come see him in three weeks.
At one of these doctor visits, I'm not sure which one, I asked the doctor if the macula had become detached. I was confident that it hadn't because from my perspective, only the upper left part of my vision had been affected and I could see the eye chart and everything in the center of my visual field. His answer wasn't what I wanted to hear. He said that the macula had detached, but not the fovea. From my online reading, visual results are better after surgery if the macula had not detached than if it had. We'll see how my vision turns out.
The other ominous thing that the doctor said is that I have some blood on or under the retina that could cause scar tissue to form like a scab, and that could cause the retina to detach again. He seemed rather concerned about that, and it has me concerned as well.
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