Typically anything that I want to type about my life I type on Facebook. Here I will type things that I don’t want anyone to see. This is perfect as I have not posted here in a long time and no doubt everyone has given up and lost interest.
Let me tell you what has been happening with my eyes in the last few years.
2018 part one – Pam and I had a great deal of medical expenses in the beginning part of 2018 and we had reached the maximum out of pocket on our insurance so everything was covered 100%. I went to my eye surgeon and asked if I could have my dual cataract surgery. He examined my eyes and it turned out I had dry eyes and I had been tearing up my corneas. He said no way could I have the surgery and I had to start putting steroid drops in my eyes every day along with special drops to combat the dryness and get the corneas to heal. Keep in mind at this point in my life I had never used eye drops because I didn’t want anything near my eyes. I had to learn quickly.
2018 part two – Towards the end of the year I suddenly lost a great deal of the vision in my right eye. I tried to see my eye surgeon but he was on vacation so instead, I saw an optometrist. He didn’t know what was happening so he sent me to a retina specialist. He said my optic nerve was swollen and bleeding and I was having a stroke. He sent me to my primary care physician who immediately sent me to the ER for an MRI. It was all free so I didn’t care. They didn’t find anything on the MRI and said I was fine…..what had happened was a mystery but I would always be 40% blind in my right eye.
2020 part one – Nothing happened during 2019 so we did not have to spend any money. On Christmas morning of 2019, I had a sudden increase of floaters and I was seeing flashing lights. So in January of 2020, I went to see the eye surgeon and he said it was nothing to worry about. I mentioned that I was 40% blind in my right eye and he freaked out as he knew nothing about this. He ran me through a bunch of tests and discovered the vision loss event of 2018 – my something like a stroke – had actually affected both optic nerves and I had blind spots in both eyes. He said it was not just a simple blood clot because it would not have affected both eyes. It was probably MS or a brain tumor so he sent me to a neuro-ophthalmologist at Mayo Clinic.
The expert at the Mayo Clinic ran me through a bunch of tests and said it was probably a brain tumor (which I did not believe). She ordered an MRI, an MRI with contrast, and a brain angiogram. In the end, she could not find anything wrong anywhere. My eye surgeon was still very concerned that I was at high risk for a stroke because that is what killed both my parents. Because we had once again reached our maximum out of pocket for the insurance I went to a cardiologist and they sent me to a series of clinics for every test under the sun. They said I was perfectly healthy.
2020 part two – It was now towards the end of the year, everything was now covered by insurance so I had cataract surgery on both eyes. Oh was a time it was! I am so glad I had learned how to put eye drops in my eyes because that was a big part of every day – every few hours as I recall. I had been wearing glasses since I was 5 years old but for 5 weeks after the surgery, I could not wear glasses, just readers for when I had to read. It turned out the right eye where I was 40% blind also had significant astigmatism so I really could not use that eye at all.
2021 – Towards the end of 2021 I needed to have laser surgery on the left eye to correct the side effect (posterior capsular opacification) of the cataract surgery a year before.
2022 – Now it is May of 2022 and today I saw the eye doctor because my vision is failing in my left eye. I can’t see much out of my right eye but what I can see with my glasses is more clear than the picture coming from my left eye. At first the doctor said my eyes were fine based on how I read the eye chart but when he did the refraction test he discovered I now have astigmatism in my left eye. It turns out that as a side effect of last November’s laser surgery the shape of the back of my eye has changed and now I need new glasses. (For those of you thinking that when you have cataract surgery you can get the really expensive lenses implanted in your eyes so you will never need glasses, don’t believe it!)
I never thought my blue eyes would bring this much drama into my life!!!