You know how I was always saying “No matter what, I will never give up blogging”? I came so close to it, I feel like a liar. Like most people dealing with the pandemic, I feel like the ground has shifted under my feet. Absolutely nothing in my life feels under my control. I’m sure that’s just me being overly dramatic and there must be something I have a handle on. I just can’t think of a thing right now. Most of it has to do with an exceptional amount of stress I seem unable to relinquish. Something as simple as the amount and type of food I put in my body sounds like something I should be able to control. I used to be able to. At least to a point. I have always overeaten, mostly because food tastes delicious. But I was able to stop. Now the more out of control things feel in my life, the more I soothe myself with food. I guess the fact that I recognize I’ve been doing this is a good thing. However, I’ve gained enough weight that my XL t-shirts are skin tight and have just become a casing for my multiple fat rolls. 😣 This isn’t a post on weight (which someday I’ll have to delve into) but a confirmation of my state of mind. I am disgusted with myself and pretty much every aspect of my life. I came up with a project for the New Year that I was excited about but have been hitting all kinds of dead ends. I will get into that in a future blog post. I am going to try to use a couple of lunch times a week to write and see if I can find any solutions. Right now, I am just trying to not give up. On my new endeavor and literally everything else. If you follow me on social media, you know I have pretty much given that up. I still follow people but rarely post. Like less than once a month. I worry and overthink everything. I feel like I’m just going through the motions of life and not interacting the way I want to.
When I woke up on Monday December 6th, I had a long floater over my right eye. I didn’t think much of it. It stayed with me all day and I woke up with it again the next day. Then I started noticing a darkness in that eye as well. As the day wore on, I was getting a bit panicked. I had just moved a bunch of books I have on Etsy to the cupboards in the basement. I had sold a book and went down to look for it. It was so dark I couldn’t see very well even with the flashlight on my phone (best invention ever!). I ended up going through the books like 4 times and couldn’t find the book and ended up having to give a refund. Tuesday night I was starting to think I better get my butt to an eye doctor in case it was serious. For decades I’ve been going to Lens Crafters for an exam and glasses. The Lens Crafters at our mall had closed up but even so, I thought I should see a REAL doctor. I looked on Yelp and there were several local eye doctors with good ratings. I decided on the one that Greg knew the location of. He had gone to that building twice for root canals. So Wednesday morning Dec. 8th, I called Park Ridge Vision to see if they could get me in. Surprisingly, they said to come right away!
Dr. Dan Press is a younger guy (30’s) and very nice. His office is big and he has many assistants who did the photos and testing of my eyes. He explained things and told me I had a tear in my retina and some of the vitreous fluid had leaked out which was the darkness. People who are excessively nearsighted are most apt to get this. He said if it wasn’t repaired, it would get worse and my retina would detach and could lead to blindness. A scary prospect, indeed! He said he would refer me to a retina surgeon who could do laser surgery. He went in another room and called him and then came in and said they would get me in today. I had to wait for their call and if they didn’t call in an hour’s time to call him and he’d call them again. So as we drove home, Illinois Retina called and said to come right in. So we drove to Skokie and had to fill out paperwork and wait around for a few hours. I had my eyes dilated (3 times total that day and they stayed dilated until the next day!) and Dr. Zac Savage came in. Doesn’t that sound like a SuperHero name?! He’s a SuperHero to me! His waiting room was jam packed and he said the surgery wouldn’t take more than a few minutes but he couldn’t do it until the end of the day. Maybe 5:30 pm or so. I couldn’t understand why if we were already there, he didn’t just do it. Then I realized that insurance had to approve it first. I bet it was thousands of dollars. Later I found out the office people spent an hour and a half on the phone with Blue Cross/Blue Shield to get it approved. So we went home for 3 1/2 hours and I was about to crawl out of my skin. I had no idea what the surgery would be like. We got a call from their office at 5 pm saying they were running behind and not to come until 6 pm. So we got there and still had to wait about 15 minutes and then the surgery was short and sweet. They put numbing drops in so you feel nothing. I imagined the laser was the size of a pen but it was like a huge, thick camera lens. I expected my eye to be held open with a metal device out of Clockwork Orange but the doctor just used his gloved thumb and forefinger to hold my eye open. He told me which direction to look (up and to the right mostly) and you would look into this greenish yellow light. It was such a relief to have it over. He said it would take “awhile” for the floater and darkness to go away. I had no clue if “awhile” was hours, days, weeks, months?!
I went home and the next day I got a call from Dr. Press asking how I was and how the surgery went. He is just the nicest! I plan to go get a true examination and new glasses from him after my followup with the Retina Surgeon on Thurs. Jan. 6th.
It took 10 days before I even noticed a little improvement. The past 2 days it’s better but the floater isn’t completely gone. I feel optimistic that it will be healed by the time I go back. In any case, I’m happy that I didn’t need the more involved retina reattachment surgery. I have since looked it up and it is not a walk in the park. I never realized how many people have eye problems. I have run into quite a few since then in person and online.
What else is coming up? Tomorrow we are giving blood. Next week another trip to the vet with our sick dog (this is a whole blog post in itself) and then dental cleanings the same day as the checkup on my eye. I hope to be back with a blog post before the end of the year. Hang in there! 👍
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