Today's Not-At-All-Walking Photo: Heyyyyyyy sorry I missed Friday. The air quality was worse than Thursday, but that wasn’t what canceled my walk. Remember a couple weeks ago when I had that cataract surgery and it went so well? Yeah. On Friday, after experiencing some weird visual symptoms and calling them in to my surgeon, I was summoned to the eye clinic and eventually learned that I had a detached retina in that eye. It’s kind of a serious thing, so it needed to be taken care of right away. Fortunately it was found to be a “small” detachment, which meant it could be repaired with an in-office procedure without anesthesia and without going to a surgical facility.
And so that’s how I ended up having pneumatic retinopexy instead of going for a walk on Friday! (Look it up – it’s super fun!) I won’t bore you with the entire process, but will just mention that a key step is injecting buoyant gas bubbles into the eye in order to press the retina against the back of the eye so that it reattaches and heals. For those keeping track at home, the gas is everyone’s favorite, sulfur hexafluoride!
All of which brings me to the image above. In the days since the procedure, when I’ve babbled nonstop about how weird it is to have these gas bubbles in my visual field, family and friends have asked me to describe it. And so yesterday, since I had some free time and somewhat improved vision, I attempted to create a visual approximation of what I’m seeing all the time. The bubbles are actually a darker purple-black color and I couldn’t quite achieve that hue, but otherwise this gives you an idea of how the bubbles are situated in my field of view. This image shows 9 bubbles of varying sizes, which is what I was seeing yesterday, but on Saturday there were more – easily 13 or 14 – and today there are only two, as all of the bubbles gradually merge into one big one.
Important note: this image shows how the bubbles appear if I’m looking straight down (which I’m not supposed to do a lot). But when my head is level and looking straight ahead, then the yellow dotted line shows how much the bubbles are present in my visual field. Isn’t this FUN??!!! I thought so too!!!
But wait, there’s also this: You might be wondering, "Heyyyyyyy, I thought you said the gas bubbles were buoyant. Well if they're so damn buoyant, why are they down there at the BOTTOM of your vision?!" And in answer to you I shall say, the fact is that your eye receives all of its visual information upside-down and reversed, and it's your BRAIN that inverts all of that information from the optic nerve and presents it to you in the correct orientation. So the optic nerve sends the brain an image with the bubbles at the top, and the brain dutifully puts them on the bottom where they "belong." I KNOWWWWWWWW!!!
Anyway. I had a follow-up with the doctor today and she assures me that everything is looking GREAT and the retina is healing up just as it should. Maybe only a few more nights of sleeping upright, and about 8-10 more days before the bubbles are absorbed into the body and disappear from view. They’ve been fascinating company, but it won’t break my heart to see them go.
Thanks for tolerating my unplanned absences and digressions. Fingers crossed that our air quality will improve tomorrow and I might be able to stumble around the neighborhood with my hands out in front of me.
