Tag: health

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Things have been a little different in Ed and Lise’s world for the past couple weeks. We did a short post-Thanksgiving trip back to Delaware, via family stops in Pennsylvania. Delaware was fun as usual. Did some work around our trailer, got in a little birding giving us three new species for the year, and soaked up the shore culture. Not much photography time but when you’re walking Cape Henlopen Point in some wicked winter winds, photography doesn’t really work.

Sanderlings on Cape Henlopen Point.

Dunlin at Cape Henlopen Point.

A couple days after returning, I had eye surgery. Last September, I had cataract and laser correction surgery. That surgery revealed some other issues in my eyes. While poking around in my left eye, my eye doctor found a hole in my macula. Not good. He referred me to an eye surgeon down in Indy. The surgeon informed me that not correcting the hole soon would lead to a large dark spot in the middle of my vision. So, back under the knife I went.

Part of the surgery required inserting a nitrogen gas bubble into my eye. The bubble is supposed to apply pressure on my macula, forcing new tissue into the hole and holding it in place. This has resulted in some interesting consequences. Starting with having to be face down 24 hours a day for a week. I was ambulatory. I could walk around but had to keep my nose pointed towards the floor. Using the good eye I could see my feet, but nothing directly in front of me.

We rented a contraption that looks like a modified massage chair for sitting face down. It did the job but would have been better if it had casters. Then Lise could have kept me oriented towards the sunlight. Or push one through the neighborhood on a walk. Maybe wheel me through the grocery store aisles. Or play crack-the-whip on the playground. Instead I just sat around like a potted plant.

My life for a week.

Another interesting consequence of a gas bubble in your eye is highly altered vision. Seeing through the bubble is like looking through a powerful magnifying glass. An inch away from my eye I can see incredible detail. More than an inch away and the world goes crazy blurry. We evolved binocular vision for a reason. It’s a really good thing. It keeps you from walking into things or ramming the car in front of you. Unfortunately, binocular vision requires two good eyes that focus in roughly the same plane. Binocular vision is a benefit of human evolution that I do not enjoy right now. Also, having eyes that focus at very different distances tends to throw your balance off.

Eventually the gas bubble will dissipate and my vision should return to something close to normal. At least normal for my eyes. This will take several weeks. Apparently starting as a line across the top of my eye, slowly sinking lower across my eye and bringing me clear vision. Until then I can’t ride in airplanes. Or go to high elevations. The change in air pressure could cause the bubble to make my retina detach. That would be bad and I really do not want that to happen. Luckily elevation change is not an issue in northern Indiana. Highway overpasses count as an elevation change here.

And finally, I have to wear a fashionable chartreuse wrist band for the next several weeks. In the event of something requiring medical care everyone will know I have a nitrous oxide gas bubble in my eye. Just in case they decide to put me in a decompression chamber to treat the bends or something.

My wristband to inform those that need to know to not put me in a decompression chamber.

Sunday, November 3, 2024

Yet another post where I start off talking about how overdue my post is. This one is almost criminally overdue. But, sometimes things just conspire against you. Such is life. Suck it up and move on I guess. 

I do have a medical reason for part of the delay. A note from my doctor if you will. A bit over a month ago I had cataract surgery. Cataracts, a fairly normal condition as one ages, is a clouding in the lens. The remedy is to break apart and remove the cloudy lens and replace it with a new clear lens. Instant brightness. Because I have some other eye issues they also did a little laser carving on my cornea. Which fixed my long distance vision but my close up vision is still miserably bad. Nowadays, both procedures are routine operations and event-less for most people. Emphasis on “most” people. 

The procedure is done in two stages. Do one eye and a week later do the second eye. Seems logical. So I had the first eye done. Routine operation and nothing serious. Except I had one corrected eye and one not corrected eye. Which was highly interesting. By switching which eye I looked through I could get very different views of the world. The change in color intensity and brightness was stunning but more interesting was the actual change in color I saw. Especially on the lighter end of the spectrum. With the corrected eye, whites were brighter and almost had a bluish cast to them. Maybe the Rayleigh scattering that makes the sky blue? Looking through the uncorrected eye the same light colored object had a yellowish cast. Which makes me wonder – would Van Gogh see his pictures differently as he aged? 

The vision difference between the two eyes made walking and driving difficult. So I popped the prescription lens for the corrected eye out of my glasses. My brain was still trying to process color differences between the eyes but at least the vision was now fairly similar between the eyes. In my shop I took off the glasses so I could cover both eyes with safety glasses. Which was fine until I was using a grinder to sharpen a tool. I had to look closely at the edge so I put the prescription glasses back on to look through the remaining bifocal. And then I turned around and went right back to grinding. With a missing lens. Sure enough, a few hours later my newly operated on eye was irritated. 

When I went back to the eye surgeons they looked in my eye and informed me I had a tiny piece of metal in it. Even asked if I was grinding something. To remove the offending metal fragment they numbed my eye and put me in the examining fixture with my forehead and chin braced. Then a technician came up behind me and put her hand on the back of my head. No warm fuzzy feeling there. Next I saw the end of a stick coming at my eye and the doctor said, “I got it”. Then she looked again and said there was a rust trail in my eye that had to be removed. So she pulled out an eyeball dremel tool. Not much different than what a dentist uses in your mouth. Only this one requires a technician applying even more pressure to the back of your head to hold it in place. 

Anyway, a couple days later I had the second eye operated on. Things seemed OK until a day later when  Lise managed to elbow me in my newly operated on eye. Her pointy little elbow fit perfectly into my eye socket. It hurt. A lot. Nothing permanent, but it hurt. 

As my eyes have been recovering from the surgery an interesting phenomenon has occurred. My eyes are cloudy when I get up in the mornings. Like I’m looking through a haze. By about noon the fog clears a good bit. The cloudiness is bad enough, but with increased light getting to my retina it can be blinding. For several weeks I couldn’t safely drive in the mornings. Or look at a bright computer or phone screen. My eyes would start watering. Your eyes have a layer of cells that transport fluid out of the eye. During the day, when your eyes are open, fluid can evaporate. All good. When you’re sleeping this layer of cells has to carry the fluid away. Lucky me, I have a very, very thin layer of cells and they can’t carry away the fluid. Not good. The fix is to have donor cells transplanted into your eyes. That just sounds like a lot of fun. Right now the condition seems to be slowly improving so we are in a wait and see mode. No pun intended. 

Other than eyeball problems, our lives have been pretty hum-drum. Working around the house like building access ramps or painting the deck cover. I’d almost rather have eye surgery than do the painting. We’ve gotten a few short trips in and have entertained some visiting family and friends. The kinds of things that don’t allow time for writing blogs. We did get a trip back to Delaware for a week or so. Playing around in that artery clogging part of the country we enjoy so much

Handicap access ramp I built for the house

Lise painting the deck cover.

Entertaining our visiting friend Lindsay at Ritual cocktail bar, Lafayette, IN.

Tea candle holders I made for Lise’s annual Natural Gals trip.

Looking down the Lewes – Rehobeth Canal in Lewes, DE.

Cape Henlopen State Park. The Delaware Bay to the left of the lighthouse, Atlantic Ocean to the right.

Paddling through the Cypress trees in Trap Pond State Park, DE

The regular breakfast guys at Heisey’s Diner, Lebanon PA. We stop in Lebanon to visit family when driving between Indiana and Delaware.

Then there’s the groundhog wars. Either I won or we are in a waiting mode until spring. Likely the latter. I had been putting cotton balls soaked in coyote urine around the shop and deck trying to scare them off. After an application they would disappear for a couple days. Then we would leave for a day and they would have re-excavated their entrances. Sometimes just a trip across town was enough for them to do their excavations. In early September, when we got back from our Delaware trip, they had naturally reopened their entrances. I switched to a spray urine application instead of the cotton balls. There was no activity for a week until I left the house for a couple hours. They reopened one entrance but they did it from the outside, not the inside. I sprayed again and after two weeks of no activity I filled the hole back in. I do leave one entrance in the back of the shop open so they are not trapped underground. There has been no sign of them since then. Either they have departed the area or have gone into hibernation. But September seems early for hibernation. Still a lot of light, warm weather, and plenty of tomatoes to ravage. I can hope the war is over but I need to wait until next spring to find out. 

Going nuclear.