sm62704's Journal: I'm in a REAL bad mood

Apologies if any comments today seem inflamitory. I should stay off of slashdot for a while, I guess.

It's my bionic eye.

I've had trouble with the thing bleeding internally, and had been seeing Dr. Odin. Last week he worried that my retina may be detaching, and cautioned me that if I lost any peripheral vision or saw what looked like a descending curtain I should come in to the offfice immediately.

And he was going out of town, but there was an alternate his office could send me to.

Sunday (of course; every time it acts up the doctor's office is closed) it seemed that I was missing some peripheral vision at the very top. It seemed like it may have been the junk that's floating around inside the eyeball since the original torn retina in December of '06. He'd welded the retina back together with a laser, and finished the job with a metal probe supercooled by liquid nitrogen.

I've mentioned before, that probe really hurt like hell. If I'd been strapped to a chair at gitmo I'd confessed to being Osama Bin laden. I'd have said anything they wanted me to. And I'm no stranger to pain; I've had arthritis in my spine since I was a teenager, and in 1976 I was driving a Gremlin, without seat belts (nobody wore seat belts back then) at 50 MPH (80 kph) and had a head-on collision with a three quarter ton pickup truck that was doing about 70 (113).

The metal dash bent where I hit it, dislocating my shoulder (and it's still like that). The windshield broke where I hit it with my face. My wife-to-be's pelvis broke in six places where I slid into her.

Being hit in the face with a three quarter tin pickup truck hurts like a bitch, but that supercooled metal probe to the eyeball... wow!

So anyway, yesterday morning I went to Dr. Odin's office, and he was out of town. Another doctor, a non-specialist, looked at it and worried that it may indeed be detaching.

Without treatment a retinal detachment will leat to complete and irreversible blindness, as the linked Wikipedia article says in gory detail.

So he sent me to St. John's Hospital's eye center, where Dr. Dodwell examined it.

I have a detached retina. That's the bad news.

The good news is, as Dr. Dodwell said, "if I had to have a retinal detachment, I'd want it where yours is. You're going to have to have a vitrectomy."

"You're going to be ok", he said. "The type of detachment you have should progress very slowly, and you can probably wait until Dr. Odin comes back for the surgery. If not, I'll do it."

He also said that there's a film behind my lens that will no longer be there, all those damned floaters will be gone, and my eyesight, already better than 20/20 (before the bleeding clouded my vision of course) will be better than it ever was.

But it's scary as hell. I'm not in a good mood at all!

Go get laid

[Slashdot Parent]

Go nail some chick. You'll fee better.

Re:

[sm62704]

I'll feel better when the surgery is over and done with. But getting laid sure wouldn't hurt!

Or maybe it would; I'm not sure it wouldn't make the eye worse. Getting laid is about the last thing on my mind right now, beleve it or not.

Re:

[Slashdot Parent]

Getting laid is about the last thing on my mind right now, beleve it or not.

Wow, it must be really bad. Getting laid has been the first thing on my mind every moment since about age 12.

Re:

[sm62704]

Yeah, but when's the last time you had to think about having three needles stuck in your eye at the same time, or think about the possibility that getting laid might make you go blind?

Re:

[Slashdot Parent]

Man, I've heard of being kinky before, but don't you think that's a little extreme?