Emergency Eye Surgery

Note: It’s actually been a couple of weeks since I first wrote this, but it took me some time to edit, seeing as I pretty much still have to read it through magnification. I’m also leaving names out of this. Not that I expect my doctors would care, and in all honest, I think they have way better things to be doing with their time than reading this shit, but just to be safe..…

My eye pressure today was 20.

If you’ve ever been to the eye doctor and they checked your pressure, it’s probably been somewhere in the teens. That’s normal. The upper limit of normal is 22. So 20 may seem a little on the high side, but last week Thurs. my pressure was 52.

Yes, I know I’m blind. That’s not a typo. 52.

I should back up. I had to have emergency cataract surgery last Thurs. I didn’t even know you could have “emergency” cataract surgery. Hell, I’ve known I had the cataract for months. I just figured I’d get around to it when I get around to it. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago at the end of Sept. I went it to get the surgery scheduled for 25 Oct. Apparently my body just likes to be disagreeable. Months with this cataract and I’m (relatively) fine and then a week after I actually schedule the surgery, my left eye decides to give me a great big “fuck you” and decides it doesn’t feel like waiting.

To be fair, I had kind of noticed something going on the night before. On Wed. night (6 Oct) I was doing laundry and noticed that my vision was a little blurry. I had been up since around 4 AM that morning so I just figured I was tired. In, what I consider to be masterful feat of irony, I was actually talking to my dad that night about the fact that I had scheduled surgery for the 25’th. So I was still a little short on the logistical details. I still had a couple of weeks to figure it out, so I wasn’t overly worried about making sure I could find a way to get to and from he hospital for the outpatient procedure. Whatever, I had time to figure it out.

So I noticed my vision was a little fuzzier than usual, and that it took a few more seconds for my eyes to adjust when going from dark into light, but I figured I was just tired so I dismissed it and went to sleep.

And then at some point my eye just decided to jump up like the annoying drunk guy at a concert and just go all fucking insane. I get up at around 5 and my vision is blurry and I have a mild headache. I think to myself, damn, that’s not good. I have stuff to do today. I was even going to take a couple of Advil (side note: I love Advil, it’s the candy coated pain reliever and I have shit posture so it works well for muscle aches in my neck and shoulders), but decided against it. So I get up, do the normal routine. Even get dressed and get ready to leave for work. That’s right, I’m such a fucking tool that I was ready to go into work with a headache and worse vision than normal (which you should know is already pretty damn horrific). I guess during this time, I didn’t really notice that my blurry vision was getting worse, probably because I was focused on the fact that my headache was, so I left for work and even made it to the end of the block before my better judgment kicked in and I turned around a blindly fucking stumbled back to my apartment.

At this point I was actually fearing something worse, like a retinal detachment. So I get back into my apartment, manage to fumble my way through my phone contact list to come up with the office for the retina specialist who did my retina surgeries (yes, plural, fuck you) back in the mid 90’s (side note: there are now girls who were BORN when I was in high school who can legally pose for Playboy. This makes me feel both sad and happy at the same time), and unfortunately, his office wasn’t open yet. Here’s the really pathetic part; I needed something to distract me from what my now noticeably worse condition compared to a couple of hours ago when I woke up so I emailed work to let them know I was going to be out. Seriously.

So I waited until about 8 when the office opened and asked to come in because I suddenly had vision loss. Never mind the fact that I don’t really have a way to get there planned out yet, but the fact that my vision was fading in and out like a narcoleptic methadone addict and there was a stampede of miniature Emu’s somehow running around in the left hemisphere of my skull, they told me to come in. My years of education apparently paid off ‘cause I was smart enough to remember how to call a cab, so by around 9 I was at Kuakini Medical Center, where for all I fucking know I may have tipped the cab driver with a $50, and in retrospect, I’m okay with that.

As I’m wandering through the lobby of Kuakini with only the vision in (what was, only a day before) my worse eye, I even got a call from work asking me about an order I was working on the previous afternoon. Which I answered. Because I’m a fucking moron.

So I managed to stumble through the lobby looking like either the best dressed, most decent smelling drunk ever, or the least capable blind person this month, and find my way to my retina specialists office. They sign me in and I found a chair to sit at. At some point during the wait, I started feeling nausea (this is one of the indications of high eye pressure by the way) and managed to, in a manner best described as “absurd platypus-like waddling” find my way towards the bathroom, where I promptly vomited into a trash can in the hallway because someone else was in the bathroom. Oddly, the fact that I could find a trash can at that point is a point of pride. By this time about 60% of my concentration is just focused on “don’t throw up. Don’t pass out. Don’t through up. Don’t pass out.”

Eventually I make it into the eye doctor’s office and one of the office nurses starts walking me through the basics.
Any meds? No.
Symptoms? Blind like Ray Charles, but way less talented, the stampede of Emu’s in my skull and now apparently I have the constitution of a sorority girl on her first pub crawl.
So she checks my eye pressure. Then she checks it again. Then she checks it again. Had I been more cognizant of how amusing this was, or you know, less focused on trying to prevent myself from throwing up on the nice woman, I would have asked what was going through her head. ‘Cause I have to imagine that reading off a pressure of 52 and not seeing my eye bulging out like a cartoon wolf looking at Jessica Rabbit, she was either very confused or very concerned.

So we go through the prep stuff and I’m directed to a seat to wait for the doctor. By this time, about 80% of my concentration is focused on “Don’t throw up. Don’t pass out. Don’t throw up. Don’t pass out.” And the nurse in the office had even given me a couple of eye drops that were supposed to be fast acting to relieve the pressure in my eye. Oddly, I felt no improvement and now my eye was stinging from the drops. Which by this point, I would have been happy just taking an ice pick to it.

I want to diverge here for a second. I don’t know how much you know about Glaucoma, but it’s one of those things that will actually let you get a legal medical marijuana card in some states. So had I truly been thinking ahead, I would have moved back to Los Angeles back in May when I knew something was up in the first place. I mean I knew the cataract was large. I had been in to see the doctor to schedule the cataract surgery just a week prior. I knew the thing was a large, dense mass (not unlike the rest of me in general) so in retrospect, my fears that it was some kind of retinal detachment or some other problem, as opposed to a cataract problem were probably a little overcautious of me. But on this particular day the first doctor that I go to see was not a Glaucoma specialize, but a retina specialist. He looked at my pressure readings, asked a few questions and came to the conclusion that “you’re having this surgery today, or at the very latest, tomorrow.” And then he called the Glaucoma specialist and started asking me how I could get from Kuakini over to Pali Momi.

Fuck I don’t know. I was kind of amazed that I got from my apartment over to Kuakini. And by 10 or 10:30 AM I was already in way worse shape than when I first arrived at the retina doc’s office. So the nurse in the office is helping me go though my phone trying to see who’s around. My work phone still rang. I should have just tied a string around it and thrown it at things so I could gauge distances properly. So we start with one of my uncles. Apparently I don’t keep my phone contacts up o date, because that number wasn’t even in service any more. So we try a different uncle, that one rings but gets to voicemail. We go back to my uncle Ralph, but try a secondary number that I think is actually Kim’s. She answers! Success! They’re in Vegas, bowling! FUCK! But they’re going to make a couple of calls and see if someone is around who might be able to take me to Pali Momi. Just as the nurse and I agree to call me a cab, because I really need to get to Pali Momi, my uncle Ronald calls me back (went to voicemail the first time) and he’s actually right near Pali Momi at that very second. But he’s not busy so he can give me a ride. Awesome. Seriously.

By this point about 90% of my concentration is “Don’t throw up. Don’t pass out. Don’ throw up. Don’t pass out.” By the way, I don’t know why the thoughts were in that particular order. I mean one would typically expect that passing out would be much worse than vomiting, medically speaking, and thus should have been the priority of my attention, but no, that’s far too logical. I get a call from my uncle Ronald and he’s somewhere hear Kuakini but I have no idea where. There’s a hospital, a physican’s tower, the medical center area (where I was), various parking lots. I’m too blind to read signs, let alone see a car. So I stumble out onto the sidewalk and I’m looking around. I vaguely see a large green blob that sounds like a large diesel engine, and ultimately based on that truck (or whatever the hell it was) we eventually get to a point where he can see me. And we’re off to Pali Momi.

Now it’s pretty clear that I’ve rapidly been getting progressively work, but for the most part, I’ve been keeping it under control. But by the time we got to Pali Momi, I’m pretty sure I looked like death. I was leaning against the counter when we signed in to do the pre-op work up and the receptionist in the office directed us to take a seat in the waiting area and I didn’t even have the constitution to verbally deny her, just in my head I was saying “nope. Thanks, but I’m good right here just leaning against the counter.” Ironically, when I went in for the post-op the next day I was talking with the nurse and she was saying that I looked better. I told her that the nausea when I checked in for the surgery was really bad and she said something to the effect of “yeah, but that’s okay, you only threw up in front of the doctor, not me.” Glad to know I kept my priorities straight.

So we did the work up and by coincidence, or random miracle, there was a cancellation that day and the doc had a few different implant lenses to choose from, so things fell pretty much in line. There were some problems trying to get an accurate measurement of the length of my left eye, but by this point I was about ready to just say “fuck it man, just take an ice pick to it” so the I’m just amazed by how smooth things went. We went directly from the pre-op work up to hospital registration downstairs and checked in.

Now personally, I hate hospitals. I’m not a big fan of doctors in the first place, but hospitals mean gowns and a bevy of nurses asking me the same questions. I suppose I should just be happy that I wasn’t freeballing it that day. Or maybe the nurses should have been glad that I wasn’t wearing a thong. Either way. But I had a great team of nurses. When they did the stick for the IV, I barely even felt it. That may be because my head was throbbing like Tommy Lee was drumming on the inside my skull (see I went clean there. I could have gone the “banging it like it was one of Pamela Anderson’s holes” but I didn’t) but I prefer to think that I had a great team of nurses there. I mean they did have to ask me the same questions that I was in no mood or condition to answer. I get that they don’t want to make a mistake, but by the fifth time they were asking me what I was here for and what eye was being worked on, I was strongly tempted to try and tell them I was there for a lung transplant or something. Had I greater fortitude or just a touch more anger, I probably would have gone the sarcastic route, but they were a great group of nurses. I’m sure that if this had gone down the day and time I had scheduled I would have gotten annoyed by the repeat questions and each time they asked I’d have come up with something new. “Oh, I’m here to get some awesomedectomy. I’m too awesome and need to get some awesome removed.” Or “No, I’m here to get breast implants.” But I didn’t have the energy to be funny.

For the surgery itself, I don’t remember much. I remember feeling something when he did the cut. I fact I remember groaning some, but I what in my head was “Ow! That fucking hurts!” I’m sure came out more like “mmooaaamwwwwwkh” or some other incomprehensible gibberish. So I do remember feeling the initial discomfort, but I don’t really remember more than that. At some point they put me full under and the next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery with a plastic shield over my eye feeling like I was hung over. Had a couple of drinks of juice and then went back to my uncle’s where I stayed a few nights.

There’s more on the follow up and the first few days after that I’ll get to later, but random sarcasm aside, I am deeply appreciative of everyone who helped me that day. Even my uncle Ralph who was in Vegas when I called managed to get in touch with someone who I don’t even think I’ve actually met more than once or twice, who called me right back and said she could have taken me from Kuakini to Pali Momi. The nurses were all great, the doctor I saw at Kuakini managed to squeeze me in on very short notice and the doc who did the surgery was nothing short of spectacular. I mean it’s not like these guys are ER surgeons. I don’t think very many glaucoma specialists on ‘on call’ for this sort of thing and I know the surgery wasn’t exactly the easiest; but more on that later. For now I’m just thankful things weren’t much worse than how they actually went down. Had I waited a few more hours or had there not been a cancellation, or had there been a mix up with the rushed registration, any number of different things could have happened. I’m thankful that things went as well as they did and that I came out with two (relatively) working eyes and didn’t end up with something like an amputated foot or a pair of 38DD’s.