My Experience with Laser Eye Surgery to fix a tear in my Retina

     Every year I go to the eye doctor for an annual check up because I started wearing glasses when I was around 6 years old. I ended up being very near-sighted.  My near-sightedness gradually got worse and worse so I kept getting thicker glasses. When I went to college, I said the heck with it and switched to wearing hard contacts. They didn't have soft or gas permeable contacts then. After about 15 years of the normal hard contacts, I was switched to gas permeable hard contacts. I wore those for a few years longer and then about 7 years ago, I decided to have LASIK surgery. It was one of the best things I ever did and I love being able to see without glasses.
     During the eye exams every year they would ask if I saw floaters. Heck, I thought I saw bacteria regularly floating on my eye but never considered them to be floaters. The picture below shows exactly what I have seen for years.

Bacterial Floaters in the Eye

    Last year everything changed. In my left eye, I began seeing some weird dark shape that seemed to move when my eye moved and I though I had scratched my eye. After calling my doctor, they said come in right away. The doctor examined me and said I have floaters from the fluid in my eye aging but he said my brain would ignore them after a while. It didn't...my brain knows there is something out there.
          About a month ago, I started seeing flashes of light in my right eye and then I saw a bunch of new floaters in that eye. There were a lot more than my left eye. Crap! Back to the doctor I went. After a lot of probing and looking in my eye with a really bright light, he told me to come back in a month with the warning that if I saw what looked like a starburst of floaters or what looked like a veil coming down, I should call him immediately.
     The month was up yesterday so I went back and after examining the eye again, he told me I had a small tear in my retina and I needed laser surgery right away. I said "in two weeks?". He said "Tomorrow!"
     I went to the hospital eye clinic today so he could perform laser surgery to repair the damage of the retina. He told me that he would make small spot welds on the retina in a circle around the tear and that would hopefully prevent the eye fluid from getting behind the retina which would cause it to detach. Yesterday he told me to take some Advil or Ibuprofen before arriving so I took three. I should have taken at least four!
     While I was waiting for my eye to dilate, I got to listen to a technician talk to two other technicians about how she just found out she was pregnant...they have one other daughter who sleeps with them in the same bed...and her husband doesn't work. He must be a Mr. Mom. It was kind of interesting to learn that my ears could hear their conversation from afar!
     Finally the doctor arrived. Apparently, he rents the laser room from the hospital and he had to get a technician to set up the machine; It wasn't a real warm fuzzy feeling listening to that conversation. At one point she asked him if he wanted her to stay and help adjust the laser. He said no. I said Oh No!
     He called me into the room and applied yet more eye drops that stung bad. Then he lowered the chair back so I was looking up at the ceiling and started to examine my eye again. When he felt comfortable, he said "here we go" and a blinding light started flashing. Holy Cow!!!! It was like looking into the sun or directly into an atomic bomb explosion! I had a bad feeling that I wasn't breathing so I tried to force myself but it wasn't easy. I imagine my sheer terror look must have looked pretty funny to him. Every so often the blinding light would stop and tears ran out of my eye. He dabbed them away, had me look another direction and then the blinding light would start up again.
     Here is a little video of the end result. You can see the little dots surrounding the tear. My doctor made three circles around the tear in my eye.

 

 

     While all this was going on, I could not see anything but the blinding light and what looked like veins in my vision. There were times when I could feel pain in the back of my eye. It felt like the laser was burning a hole right through my eye into my brain! Then I began to feel like I was floating in the air. What the heck? Was I tripping or what? I couldn't see anything and lost reference to where I was.
     It reminded me of when my boys were in Indian Guides and we chose to be the Blackfoot tribe. Apparently, Blackfoot Indians held sun dances and stared at the sun until they fell down or were blinded. OMG! Here's a picture of one of their sun dances.

 



     The light stopped again and he dabbed my eye with tissue. I was thinking he was done when he said "We're about halfway done...". What! What the heck was he doing? Welding the retina to the back of my head or what?
     "Look to the right." I looked right and the flashing continued on. At one point I thought I couldn't take much more of this. He must have sensed it and said "OK, we're done! Let me take one more look." He did and announced that we were truly done. He said that he made three circles around the tear. I guess if the first one gives out, the second or third will hold it. Ugh!
     He tilted me up in the chair again and for the first time I noticed that I was completely blind in my right eye. OMG!!! I'm blind! I told him I couldn't see and he said not to worry. He said it was like staring at a thousand camera flashes. Yeah, right! After a while I began to see red. I asked him if my eye was bleeding. He said no.  A little while later, I began to see yellow. I didn't know what to make of that. Finally I began to see a little bit of images. He told me it would take a while to see things clearly. That was an understatement.
     My wife drove me home and I proceeded to wear sunglasses for much of the afternoon. I took some more Ibuprofen and it helped. My eye was still somewhat dilated 7 hours after the procedure. Now my vision is pretty good out of that eye but I still have the floaters.  I need to have a follow up checkup in just over two weeks. Let's hope it is still OK then.
     If you are having the procedure done, have someone drive you and take your sunglasses. Also, take between two and four Ibuprofens before you get there.
     Until my next blog, here's to looking at the sun!