Coming Back?

I've had a lot of injuries in the last two years that kept me from running.  I strained my achilles tendon two springs ago and that forced me to the couch for nine months because I couldn't run through it, or run at all, and for two months two summers ago I was in The Boot, which helped my healing.

I came back to running last spring and was slowly kicking up my pace, mileage and conditioning when mid-summer I was felled by a detached retina which required four surgeries, two of them emergency operations and two more that were delayed for weeks or months because of various circumstances on the surgeons' part.  

The first surgery hurt a lot (I don't believe I was sedated properly, if at all) but the second was the worst although I was out so I didn't feel a thing.  They filled my eye with oil to keep my eye pressure sufficient for  the retina to heal properly without deteriorating further. Reinas heal slowly, believe me.

But worse still was the feeling it engendered within me.  There was an organ in my body (my eye) that was foreign (filled with silicon) and my body wanted it out.  A few times a day I experienced white flares in my vision, good as it was in its permanently impaired state, that rose from lower left corner of my affected right eye like a nova and I would still all motion until it subsided and went away.  Exposure of my optic nerve as the oil in my eye sloshed around?  I don't know, I just got a vague answer from my ophthalmologist when I complained to him about it and he just told not to do it.  Well!

Worse still was that it felt like if I fell hard due to my shaky vision, say I pitched forward by tripping on broken  or uneven pavement, that my eye might split open.  Yep, that's what my foreign eye felt like, very strange, and I stayed on the couch till my third operation in December when they took the oil out (or at least most of it--I have these maddening residual small silicon globules floating around through my vision permanently like tiny astroid clouds from the oil they couldn't completely flush out when they operated).

Then I had cataract surgery on that eye last month, a cataract that developed suddenly and rapidly due to the eye trauma I experienced, as is normal with retina detachment repair, and I feel now that my eye, and my vision, is as good as it's going to get and my eye is healed.  

So on May 1, I went out for an intended slow half-mile run, after stretching assiduously.  I made a quarter mile before I had to walk a block, twice.

That first week I ran a second time and that time I pushed through my overwhelming urge to stop after a quarter mile and finished my half mile run, getting my second wind on the backside of the run.

This week I was going to run a half-mile three times.  I ran a slow half-mile on Monday and it went okay.  I even picked up the pace a little the last two blocks.

This morning I had to wait for an electrician to come deal with a problem at my house, so the morning was used up before my thoughts turned to adhering to my running schedule.  Here was the crisis, I wanted to have lunch instead and I didn't feel like getting into my running togs.  But I changed and went out into the street and started stretching my achilles.  The neighborhood steady runner ran by and stopped to talk and our discussion soon turned from politics to running.  I told him I was trying to return to running and my planned slow schedule.  He nodded approvingly and asked if I was returning from my run or about to set off.  I truthfully told him that I was "procrastinating."

He laughed and said I should make sure my pace wasn't too fast.  "You're going to run, right?" he said, looking dubiously at me.  "Yeah, yeah," I said as he set out on his run and I started stretching again.  I sure didn't feel like it.

But I walked over to the W&OD Trail and got underway at a slow shuffle.  My neighbor passed me going the other way on his eight mile run, having entered the trail a different way half a mile up.  Here I was just starting my half-mile run.  He said, "You're going too fast!" as he ran by.  "Slow down."  

I decided he wasn't mocking me but that he was right, and I slowed down to barely past a walk.  But I made the half mile run feeling good once I got underway and again, I picked up the pace at the end.  Best of all, I haven't injured myself or lazily gotten off schedule--yet.  A half-mile on Friday, repeat the schedule another week, and then I'll kick it up even further, I hope.  It seems pathetically slow (literally) but otherwise I might stop in discouragement if I put on too much mileage or pace right now.

2018, 4th Quarter

October dawned and I started volunteering for the Jennifer Wexton for Congress campaign in the Virginian Tenth District, one district over from mine, a district a few miles to the west that stretched from McLean to the West Virginian border through the vineyards and horse country of Northern Virginia, one that had been bright red for the last forty years.  There was no sense in working in my deeply blue district inside the beltway, a house seat that was so safe for the Democrats that during the lead up to the Midterms I even met my Congressman, Don Beyer, in a Wexton campaign headquarters about to go out canvassing for her!  The volunteering was satisfactory work as I knocked on forty-plus doors from a dedicated list each time and spoke to 30 to 50 people, collecting pledges to vote and distributing or leaving behind campaign and voting information hung on doorknobs.

In addition to many loyal Democrats I encountered, there were, apparently, a lot of converted Republican voters I spoke with, people who were seething to vote against the two-term GOP incumbent Barbara Comstock in a passion that barely disguised its anti-Trump nature in this suburban, barely outside the beltway district.  The month-long effort produced a gamut of responses to my knocking on doors, from the household where the occupant threatened to shoot me if I didn't get off his property and assaulted me as I turned to leave to several sincere statements of thank-you-for-coming, with a particularly nostalgic, for me, encounter where an elderly gentleman patiently listened to my verbal windup while studying my sweating visage and kindly said that he was a loyal Republican but would I like a glass of water or a cold soda before I left, the way people in our great country used to treat each other, including the occasional stranger.  I was excited and mightily satisfied to see that the Virginian Tenth District was the very first Congressional district in the entire country to be called as flipping by the networks about forty minutes after the polls closed, presaging a mighty blue tsunami of house seats flipping resulting in a forty-seat democratic majority in Congress, including the Virginia congregation going from a 7-4 gerrymandered Republican majority to a 7-4 Democratic majority overnight.

I was scheduled for an operation early in November to remove the oil from my right eye that had been placed there during the second surgery in August to repair my failing retina once the first surgery in July failed in that regard by the insertion a self-decomposing gas bubble, but shortly before the date it was reset to late December because my doctor broke his arm and couldn't perform surgery during his recovery period while he wore a cast.  Although sorely disappointed at this, as my eye-filled eye bothered me greatly as I feel that my body intrinsically knew there an important organ with a totally foreign substance within it and wanted it out, this pause at least gave me the opportunity to travel by car to Columbus to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my sister there and her family.  During that visit I was also able to visit with my college freshman roommate who was there visiting his ailing uncle.

In December I finally had my third, and hopefully last, eye surgery and it was painless, in stark contrast to the first surgery which was, well, agonizing albeit brief (I was totally out during the second surgery at my insistence, but this wasn't an option for the oil removal procedure for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained to me) and so far the retina has continued to "adhere" to its wall of rods and cones and the tears in it have fully healed.  There has been no period of face-down recovery this go-round, although I am severely limited to a sedate recovery for six more weeks (no lifting anything over five pounds) and then to a less-than-strenuous period (no running) for two months after that, and if that all goes well (my fingers are definitely crossed, I'll be as "fully" recovered as I am going to get with this apparently genetically caused occurrence.  I was able to go around the District solo on a bicycle prior to my operation last week on my annual holiday-lights "run."

2018, 3d Quarter

July dawned hopefully when on its first day I toured the wine country in Virginia with a friend and we settled into a delightful afternoon of sampling wine offerings from at the Stone Tower Vineyard, and the future looked bright.  The month closed out with a medical emergency which I am still recovering from--the sudden loss of sight in my right eye due to a torn retina requiring immediate eye surgery.  Two more eye surgeries later, it finally seems that perhaps I will save much or most of my sight in that eye.

In between that yin and yang, I attended a memorial service at a lovely church in Ambler, PA  in honor of a cousin of mine, Andrea, who led a notable life as a social worker.  Enroute to that somber event I enjoyed a minor-league baseball game in York, PA, once the capital of the USA for a short while, and paid tribute to a friend of mine who lost his life in 2010 defending our freedoms in Afghanistan, whose likeness was emblazoned on a flag alongside the road on a hill overlooking downtown York amidst a sea of other flags honoring other fallen heroes from the York area (Adam was born in York) in this century's wars.  I also watched July Fourth fireworks from my back steps after enjoying a holiday lunch at the local gourmet pizzeria, forlornly hoping that any or all of my estranged children would finally show up, had lunch with my mentor from my former workplace, ran a few miles on the Mall with a colleague from my former agency where we ran by and momentarily joined in with an active rally for a woman's right to choose the medical provisions she desires or needs for her own body, and hiked the Billy Goat Trail in MD with a friend.

August was tied up with healing from my two surgeries of last summer in a mode of recuperation  known as face-down recovery, where you lie face-down in stillness for 14 hours a day for a couple of weeks following retina surgery, an infamous procedure known only to those unlucky persons who have the onset of torn or detached retinas, largely, I am told, due to genes and can suffer from multiple eye surgeries in amelioration of the condition.  It sucks bigly, and in the second surgery the medical team filled my eye with oil to get the retina to adhere to its bed of cones and rods, a procedure which requires a subsequent surgery to get the oil back out again.  Late in the month I did go for a walk around Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River with a friend, ate out a few times with friends and had a friend take me to see a baseball game at a minor league park in MD.

September was similarly spent sedately, wherein I enjoyed a holiday lunch on Labor Day at my local gourmet pizzeria, discovered that some miscreants had stolen my spare tire sometime during the prior months from my vehicle while it was parked in my driveway most likely, and armed my household following this second expensive invasion of my curtilege during this century.  Mostly I hung around waiting for the day when the oil would be scooped out of my afflicted eye and replaced, naturally, with eye fluid, a procedure I yearned for because the eye never felt right, being filled with a foreign substance within a closed system, and it led to the infrequent but maddening onset of white flare outbursts within my vision in that eye when, as the doctor explained to me, the optic nerve was momentarily uncovered by some movement of mine, a condition which I scrupulously sought to avoid by trying not to have any sudden movements of my head.  Late in the month my sister came to town on business, and we spent a wonderful evening and a day wandering around the District visiting museums, eating in Chinatown and drinking in Irish Pubs.

At best, it's going to be a long four months.

I saw the doctor yesterday for the day-after appointment, and he said the retina looked alright, that it was still adhering to its wall of cones and rods so that was good.  The pressure in my good eye is normal at 18 and the pressure in the recovering eye is 5, which he said would come upon by the one-week appointment.

There's blood in the eye and I have maddening tiny bubbles floating all around my field of vision which he said were silicon oil globule since they can't get all the oil out so I guess I better get used to a moving cloud in my eye.  If the recovery proceeds well, I will have to be on severe restrictions for 8 weeks--no sneezing, coughing, bending over, picking anything up over 5 pounds, and taking eyedrops every 4 waking hours, ointment at night, a daily stool softener, with travel restricted and no driving for now.

But, no face-down period of recovery.  I am grateful for small, or perhaps big, things in light of this misfortune.  After that down period, for two more months I have to take it very easy, no running, workouts or strenuous activity.

Then if all goes well, sometime next spring, I can start getting back with my life.  I'm starting to think that my big car trip around the good ol' USA that I thought I would take after I retired will never happen.

Surgery

Tomorrow's the big day. Report at 6:30 am to pre-op to save your sight.

Anxious?  Yeah.

Didn't get your bloodwork done this week?  Oops, I forgot, I'm old and can't remember things.

Maybe they'll send me home because I didn't get it and push the eye surgery further down the road.  Couldn't be worse than obviating the October 30th surgery because the dock broke his arm right before that date, necessitating a delay because of him.

I'm O+ anyway so any old blood will do, I think. At least they keep calling me to donate because they love my blood.

The first (of three, counting tomorrow) eye surgery didn't go so well, it hurt a lot and failed to boot so I am leery, to say the least.  They won't tell me exactly what went wrong but I think they blame me for both aspects of the botched surgery.

Me, I blame the first anesthesiologist, because I never felt such shocking pain, in my eye no less. I wasn't expecting it, having had several surgeries before, including where I've been aware of my surroundings, where I never felt a thing.

But this was different, and I never willingly want to experience that again.  Unless I was forewarned, so I could be forearmed.

Perhaps I am wrong, and every so often surgery hurts so much that you'll never forget that first cut for the rest of your life.  Luck of the draw maybe, or perhaps I pushed my so-many-times-painfree quota past its limit.

Or perhaps I got someone who went to Western Florida State instead of Harvard and skipped most of her classes.  I certainly never saw her after the surgery (the surgeon called me as I was being driven home) and although I have voiced my suspicions about the reason for my difficulty in lying still for the surgery, no one has confirmed or disputed my stated inklings.

I can safely say that I never want to get operated on again.  But I'll show up tomorrow and hope (trust) that I won't suddenly feel crushing pain.

Anxious

I am a lawyer.  Do you think I ever get completely accurate information from doctors?

My 3d eye surgery comes up next week because the first emergency surgery, for a retinal tear, failed and the second emergency surgery filled my eye with oil which now has to come out.  I can't wait for it to be over because I am dreading it.

Why did the first surgery fail? There was no reason given except that, me being an anomaly of that one in 10,000 people who inexplicably develops retinal detachment, I was further statistically unlucky in being in the ten percent of recipients of corrective surgery whose procedure did not adhere. How well I remember the first surgery where, having been given a local anesthesia, I shockingly felt the scalpel go into my eye like a hot spike and the doctor yelling at me as I thrashed around on the operating table to Be Still!

The surgeon explained to me on the day-after follow up checkup that I was extremely "anxious" about the surgery and therefore I reacted badly to the operation as it occurred and he wasn't able to fully "cement" the "background" of my eye with his laser as he wished to because I was moving around too much but he was able to fully zap the tears in my retina so the operation was a wrap although shorter than he wished. Except that a week later I was under the knife again because at the one-week checkup the retina (but not the tears) was detaching, but for that procedure I was totally under so I didn't (obviously) feel a thing. 

For the third operation next week I am going to get a local again because for some reason, I have to be sentient during the delicate procedure while they swap out the W-40 for saline solution because otherwise I might retch involuntarily under general anesthesia but such an unlikely occurrence would "ruin" my eye if they had to . . . what, work to revive me?

Furthermore, with the white flares that erupt in my right eye several times daily bedeviling me, which the doctor said was my retina "flexing" and therefore exposing my optic nerve, I wonder if when the eye is cut open to drain the oil, whether my retina will "roll up" as the doctor explained to me might happen, in which case he would insert the gas bubble to keep the eye pressure up, which returns me to the July 31st surgery, the very first operation (that failed) and two weeks of face down recovery.  Did you ever watch Groundhog Day?  Go straight to Jail and do not pass Go.

I greatly fear the possibility of a stabbing pain in my eye during next week's operation similar to what I felt during the first operation because my memory of it is strong and my control of my body in response to such sudden intrusive pain is weak.  But I have also come to think that the anesthesiologist for the first operation might have botched her part and they're not telling me that, and in my sudden pain then I moved involuntarily and that ultimately caused the first operation to fail, because it wasn't completed fully.  I hate to be fearful, and I am wont to be suspicious, which leads me to be anxious.

Why, how nice of you to call me, doctor...

The phone rang and although I didn't recognize the number, it was a Virginia area code so I answered it.  It was my eye doctor, an ophthalmologist, the one who is going to be operating on me next week to remove the oil from my eye which has finally healed from the two retina detachment surgeries I underwent in July and August.

I am anxiously looking forward to having that third operation, despite another potentially painful surgery and onerous recovery period, because my oil-filled eye is driving me crazy with its occasional white flare bursts inside it, the lack of clarity of vision from it and my inability to see much in very low-light situations where all distant lights, such as street lamps or approaching headlights, look like blurry kaleidoscopes.  But I was suspicious as the doctor and I exchanged phone pleasantries, and I waited for the other shoe to drop.

"Sir, I am sorry to tell you but I had an accident over the weekend and I broke my arm.  I must postpone your surgery for eight weeks or more until it heals, although this time period will not have a deleterious affect upon your eye in the lest."

I earnestly wished him a speedy and full recovery as we ended our call.  As I hit the call-end button, I suddenly became very depressed.

Gloomy

The year is three-quarters over.  It's been a terrible year.

The country is broken and our Republic is dying.  The soulless Mitch McConnell, a democracy-destroying constitution-shredding republic-wrecker, is busy turning our country into a kleptocracy with conditions more akin to Louis XVI's France than to Eisenhower's America.  Read A Tale of Two Cities for what we are rapidly becoming, then read Lincoln's second inaugural address for what we still could be.

Fifty-one senators represent 18% of the American population, exposing a glaringly unrepresentative flaw in the Founding Father's vision.  This gives absolute power of governance to the Rasputin-like McConnell who impeded the popularly elected President Obama at every turn, has enabled the faux president Trump in all his corruption and monomania, and has stacked the Supreme Court unconstitutionally (remember Merrick Garland?) so that that formerly august body has been thrown, perhaps irretrievably, out of whack.  Women will lose control of their bodies to religious ideologies and pinch-faced men, corporations will further reign supreme, the environment will be even more ravaged, gerrymandering will run further rampant and the flood into politics of hidden money, both domestic and illegally by foreigners, such as the flow of money to the Trump campaign in 2016 from Russian oligarchs through the NRA, will so corrupt our republic that it will steal our democracy from the working stiffs, the rightful owners of it, along with their futures.

Things aren't any less bleak personally.  I've lost 20% of my retirement savings this year, and all anticipated travel has been postponed, perhaps permanently.  Worse, my eye surgeries have left me feeling almost out-of-body as I heal, with at least one more eye operation on the horizon.  I don't drive after dusk, it's so hard to see in the dark, and my vision out of my oil-filled eye isn't so clear, for sure.  The occasional sudden white flare bursts within that eye are driving me mad.

A cousin of mine died, another one suffered the same eye surgery I had, her husband suffered emergency organ removal surgery, both operations thankfully successful, a boyhood friend suffered lower spine fusion surgery even while he lives all alone in a new city following his recent divorce, a close friend suffered a fall and awaits surgery following it, a sister has lung cancer, and a brother sent me an unhinged effin-laced email screed which I perceived as a potentially lethal personal threat, and in which he unpleasantly and pointedly asked how my kids were (he knows I haven't heard from any of them in 15 years).  But he went to Yale from his elite prep school, and we all have seen recently what very special people those type of entitled, besotted Yale alumni are.

The last thing bothered me a lot, as my estrangement from my three sons, a result of The Divorce, is tragic and taught me that life is too short to act permanently and without measure upon petty personal grievances, no matter how great a slight a rational person might fancy them to be, then or now.

I'm getting on, and soon enough I'll be moving on, undoubtedly.  I hope to see any or all of my children before then, and even the daughter-in-law I know about, so that we can start living our familial life going forward, one day at a time.  I have always been available for them for all of their three decades of life.  Monday's a holiday, Columbus Day.  I'll be at the regular place for lunch then at noon.  ;-)

I love my cousin... .

Yesterday I got a call from my cousin.  I knew she was undergoing retinal reattachment surgery that day, which, since I had undergone that very same surgery last month, I was keenly interested in and very aware of.  She told me her operation was over and she was at home resting.

She said her surgery had gone well and it hadn't hurt a bit.  I was so glad to hear this, not only for her sake but also because I am facing another bout of this same surgery myself.  My cousin knew of my bad experience with this same surgery in July, the first of my two emergency eye surgeries in a one week span.

When I reached out to her two days ago to wish her luck in her upcoming surgery, she alluded to her hope that her surgery would go better than mine.  I felt bad then that I had posted so readily about my "discomfort" from my initial surgery, which is apparently undergone often by old folks like me, mostly without notable pain or lack of success.

Mine wasn't so bad, I told her then on the eve of her surgery, and there were conditions present in my first operation that clearly were not present in hers that would undoubtedly make her experience much different from mine.  For instance, hers had been scheduled for a week already, whereas I was immediately slapped into the surgical ward within minutes of the initial consult with no time in which to reconcile the procedure internally, which left me anxious, and I didn't have any family present.  Additionally, I still don't trust the skill level of the anesthesiologist who was present that day.

Her son Jimmy had been there already to give her love and support, in stark contrast to my sons who apparently don't give a damn about anyone but themselves, and of course her husband Bill had been taking good care of her.  Certain friends of mine had wonderfully provided this support and love for me on a moment's notice, and others have called me to express their hope for my speedy recovery.

This sweetheart of a relative had reached out to me in the immediate aftermath of her surgery to assure me that her operation had been painless, as she knows that I am facing the same surgery, again, later this fall to get the oil out of my eye.  She knows intuitively that I have been facing this prospect with trepidation.  I love my cousin, so concerned about others even in the hour of her need.  Get better soon, Liz.

Good News and Bad News

About three weeks after the last surgery, my eye started feeling better and driving wasn't a totally exciting adventure.  Oh yeah, I could drive, I just had to be careful because my vision off to the right was distorted and lacked depth perception because of the blurry picture I received in my brain from my healing, oil-filled eye.  I have a powerful truck so if I wasn't poking along stubbornly in the right lane, I would have to memorize what the closest car to me was in the lane off to the right, identify that car in my passenger mirror before I moved over to the right and goose the car to stay ahead of it as I moved right into the free space.

But then my anxiety went into overdrive.  My first surgery had failed after a week, but my second surgery was okay at the one-week checkup but then the next check-up was scheduled for two months away.  I decided to move that consultation up to see if this delicate surgery was holding, in light of my daily effort not to strain myself or pick up more than five pounds, which was an impossible standard to meet unless I stayed in bed all day.  For instance, my vacuum cleaner was in the basement; it probably weighs twenty pounds but I waited three weeks before I brought it up to the main floor for some much-needed vacuuming.

When I called for an earlier appointment, they gave me the first available opening, one month out instead of two months out.  As my eye continued to heal, I saw or imagined all sorts of ominous warning signs--floaters, tiny clear bubbles in my field of vision, occasional sudden, momentary flashes of white light.  The day of my late afternoon appointment late last week was totally anxiety-ridden, as all day I imagined what the doctor would see when he looked into my dilated eye.

However, the examination left me feeling giddy because he said my eye was healing nicely.  Then he asked when I wanted to schedule the third surgery, to get the oil out of my eye.  It would be like the first surgery, he said, where I was sentient during surgery and in great "discomfort" unlike the second surgery when I was out, but he said he would give me more or different drugs to put me in la-la land.  The old good news, bad news routine, although this was obviously great news because the eye was healing and my sight was returning to close or closer to normal vision.

Half full

My first eye surgery was on July 31st, and the second was on August 9th.  The first time I was awake and aware in the OR, by the doctor's design, and although sedated apparently, I suffered a lot of "discomfort" during the procedure as he later termed it.  The next time I was under and it went much better for me because I didn't feel or remember the surgery.  The night following the surgery, the most difficult point in the recovery period, was much better the second time.

Standard procedure for worsening retinal detachment or tears is to replace the vitreous humor with a gas bubble and wait for the lasered retina to heal and the gas bubble to dissipate and sight improves as it heals.  It takes 4 to 6 months to fully heal and don't fly too soon or your eye might burst.  They give you a green wrist tag to wear with this vivid warning.

If this surgery fails, an oil bubble is inserted into the eye which keeps it inflated for 2 to 4 months as the retina heals.  This oil has to be removed with additional surgery which necessitates another two-month recovery period for the eye to heal from that.  Then, yay! it's a permanent fix.

But if the oil ball treatment doesn't work, then as my doctor put it, there's only "one more bullet in the cartridge belt," surgery to band the eye.  I don't know what that procedure is and I shudder at the sound of it.  But I don't believe I'm headed in that direction, despite horror stories I've heard about this surgery being repeated several times that I hope are outliers.

I had two eye surgeries in a week--don't try that at home!

Shockingly, eight days after emergency eye surgery on my "bad eye,"which was definitely rapidly going blind by the hour (three tears in the retina in the superior region), I was undergoing emergency eye surgery for a second time to save either my typical-or-less normal eyesight or to save my dominant eyeball. I was apparently, according to the ophthalmologist, a bad actor who didn't adhere to the severe recovery routine, but remember that he was the surgeon whose operation had failed, and I was discharged from this second surgery within the hour for my most important sense, sight.

My friend Steve drove me to my friend's apartment (all on one floor) (she was away for a family wedding) and I underwent a week of intensive eyeball-saving recovery routine.  Oh yeah, I did.

What had transpired was that I had had the first hopeful surgery to retain my sight, the insertion of a gas bubble into my eye (to keep it inflated) (90 to 95% success rate) (surgeons lie) fail, so now an oil bubble occupied my eye.  It would have to be removed, if the secondary procedure was successful, with a third eye surgery (the gas bubble dissipates, ending the surgical merry-go-round) to remove the oil.

An excruciating week followed wherein my head was flat on a table for 14 hours a day, forehead down.  It sucked hugely, and I went to my one-week-after doctor's appointment with great trepidation, because it seemed that every time I went to Kaiser they slapped me into the OR.

I can fit you in for surgery at noon. It's 11:15 now. Who can come pick you up afterward?

After eight days of lying around miserably following my emergency eye surgery to stave off blindness in my right eye, keeping my head parallel to the floor for as much and as well as I could, I presented myself to the doctor for my one week check-up.  It did not go well.

"Your three tears in the superior region of the retina are still adhering due to the lasering I performed last week but your retina is detaching in the inferior region of your right eye, perhaps due to the inflexible nature of the scarring as the surgery heals which can produce a tension that pulls on the rest of the retina, which is a very delicate covering of the interior of the eye that has the width of only one third of a single layer of an onion skin.  You're going to need immediate additional surgery."

I was shocked and dazed at the doctor's words.  The surgery a week ago had hurt a lot, and the recovery so far had sucked, and it had all apparently been for naught.

"I can fit you in at noon today."  I looked at my watch, it was 11:15 in the morning, my second emergency surgery in eight days was in 45 minutes and I was there alone, as the friend at whose house I had been staying had gone to Florida for a family wedding the night before.

Nothing like it

After a restless night when I finally fell asleep for a few hours early in the morning, I went back to the doctor the next day. He wanted to check on whether the surgery was taking, and it appeared to be.

The technician ripped the tape off my closed eye, checked its pressure, which was okay, and held up various fingers for me to count.  I could see out of my affected eye, which was encouraging because the afternoon before, when I was wheeled into surgery, about 7/8ths of the vision was occluded in that eye.  Then the doctor came in and explained the surgery which he said had inserted a gas bubble into my eye to replace the vitreous humor and the bubble would dissolve over time as it was replaced by eye fluid during the healing process, and my vision should gradually improve as that occurred.

We discussed my discomfort during surgery the night before.  I don't think he appreciated me as a surgical patient because when he had cut into my eye I was awake and aware and I reacted badly, moving my head in response to the pain ("Lie still!  No talking!"), which I felt palpably, and I moaned softly as he worked, which allayed the incredible anxiety I felt as a burning sliver of metal was jabbed into my eye and thrust about (at least, that's what it felt like).

The doctor was reassuring although he considered the job incomplete because despite repairing the three tears in the retina with his laser, he hadn't fully cemented to his satisfaction the background or "wallpaper" as he called it because I was a moving too much.  But he cited the 90-95% success rate with the procedure as he assured me it was going to be an onerous recovery, and he said he would see me in a week.  Oh what a visit that would turn out to be!

He'll see you tomorrow

Bad things always seem to happen on weekends when the co-pay is double. A black spot had inexplicably developed in one eye.

I called my health-care provider and was given an appointment with an eye doctor for Wednesday. It didn't hurt, and I pretended that my vision was returning to normal.

On Monday I realized my vision definitely wasn't improving, it was getting worse. I called my health-care service again and said I couldn't wait until Wednesday, that I was losing my sight.

I was given an appointment on the morrow with an ophthalmologist, not an optometrist as formerly scheduled. Most ominously the advice nurse shortly called me back and advised me not to eat or drink anything after midnight.

Who you gonna call?

When my vision started failing in my right eye, I underwent two emergency surgeries upon my eye a week apart.  Each time when I went to see the ophthalmologist, I did not expect to suddenly be scheduled for immediate surgery and I was confronted with summoning a caregiver to come get me afterwards.

I have two friends in the area who would do that for me but they both work and when I called, suddenly they were unexpectedly being asked to leave work for the day to come to my assistance, which each one readily did.  My thoughts about asking for help never turned to any of my three sons, all men around thirty now, two of whom, I believe, live in the state, three lads who I helped bring into this world and whom I bestowed love and care upon for all those years until, during and since the nuclear divorce launched upon the family by their mother whom I believe to be a covert narcissistic who overbore their immature wills for her gratification at the time, and they haven't communicated with me or any Lamberton since then.

As I have publicized, every holiday at noon I go to the same restaurant for lunch, hoping for a fresh start someday with one or more of them, also I fruitlessly went to pick them up on every other Friday for court-ordered visitation until the last one turned 18 (their mother showed them how easy it is to be a scofflaw) and I provided full college tuition and fees for two of them without a word of thanks from either of them, and still hold a full tuition plan for the third (although the IRS has demanded that the plan be vacated so taxes on it can be collected). That is what familial love demands and manly duty requires, in my estimation, generous and upstanding attributes I obviously didn't impart to these three mighty unusual adults who apparently still worship at the altar of the mother that they love oh-so-much.

As I approach my seventies, it makes me sad that I couldn't count one bit on any of my three fully mature adult sons when I really needed help. I have a third operation coming up in a few months and I want them each to know that if anything unexpected happens they would probably be contacted by one of their Lamberton aunts or uncle, if possible, to provide a small amount of cash to each one of them.

Numbers

Following my retirement at the end of May, I ran 100 miles in June and 135 miles in July.  My mileage suffered a setback last month though, as I underwent surgery on August 12th and had to take two weeks off as I recovered.  (My last run, at 4:30 am, on the morning I underwent surgery at 6:30 am.)

Since the surgery, I have run 19 miles, slowly, to finish out the month of August, giving me 90.2 miles for the month.  Happily, my weight was under 180 on the last day of the month, the same as it was on the day of the procedure.  (Coming home from Kaiser after my procedure, thanks to friends who took care of me that day.)

The conditions the surgery repaired, a return of an umbilical hernia (I had the same condition repaired in 2011) and an abdominal hernia, took six months to be scheduled after diagnosis (I was complaining of pain in my abdomen during long runs) by Kaiser Permanente, my insurance carrier.  That lengthy delay is unacceptable, in my opinion.  (A cut here, a cut there… .)

The cost was acceptable though.  I spent out of pocket about $235 all told, including testing and medications, although I'm pretty sure that's at least double what I spent out of pocket to have a hernia repair five years ago.  (I'm back to running, albeit slowly and for short distances for now.)