I did not plan on writing in My Current Situation series so soon because I wanted to wait until I had my hearing test and the results had come back and I wanted to wait for the appointment with my APRN to review the results of my 30 day’s worth of blood pressure pills (to see if I truly had a blood pressure problem). However, 3 days ago I had an eye emergency which changed everything.
To play it back, in 2024 (2 years ago) I called my eye doctor’s office to schedule an eye exam for the first time since the Covid Pandemic of 2020. I made this eye appointment because I was seeing floaters in my right eye, “small specks, dots, circles, lines, or cobwebs in your field of vision – although floaters appear to be in front of the eye, they are actually floating in the vitreous fluid inside the eye.” The eye care doctor’s office front desk receptionist asked what took me so long to schedule an eye appointment and I told her in all transparency that no one in their office had pinged me since the onset of the 2020 Pandemic and I hadn’t honestly really thought about my eye health. My bad…
As it turned out the eye appointment I had in 2024 for the floaters in my right eye was not at all that serious because after my eye was dilated, the eye doctor was able to see that all I needed for these floaters were prescription eye drops.
Now 2 years later in this scenario the floaters (a long black curly string) were in my left eye and more of a nuisance than anything else. On the second day this piece of curly black string had turned into tiny black dots which appeared one at a time but were forming a starry sky. My inner voice urged me to call the eye doctor. I originally wasn’t going to call because I thought this is what happened before and the remedy was eye drops but something said, Call. So I called and told the eye care doctor’s office front desk receptionist what happened and she said she needed to speak with the clinician because they may ask you to come in today and I said why can’t it wait until Monday and she said if its a retina tear, which it sounds like it could be, we would be condoning you not coming in which could lead to a bigger problem. Sure enough the clinician called me back within 5 minutes and said I needed to come in as soon as possible. They scheduled my appointment on that same day for 1245p. I reluctantly cancelled an upcoming client lunch at Solun Restaurant in Woodbridge with one of my favs and went to the eye doctor’s office in Hamden, CT.
After getting and A-cing an initial eye test my left eye was then dilated so the eye doctor could examine it. What he discovered unfortunately were 2 retinal tears in my left eye! He told me and the technician that this was a very serious case and it would need to be dealt with today. He asked the technician to have the front office girls call around to see which eye surgeon could get me in on a Friday. The only office that had an opening (or was even open on a Friday) was in Trumbull, CT which is only 25 minutes away (with no traffic) from Hamden but it was a Friday…so traffic central…
I drove myself home to North Haven so that James, my partner in love could drive me to the eye surgeon’s Trumbull office. It was crowded there with mostly middle-aged and elderly people. I filled out the necessary paperwork and was seen by a technician within a half hour. My left eye was dilated and afterwards another technician examined me then sent me back to the waiting room. The longest wait was getting in to see the eye surgeon who had multiple eye surgeries stacked up in front of mine.
I tried to read and send text messages to kill time but my vision was too blurry from the recent dilation and my eye felt heavy.
This is how much time we still had, James was able to go eat lunch and make it back before I even got into see the eye surgeon (smile).
Ignorance is bliss though because I can honestly say had I known what was coming up, I probably would have bolted from the waiting room. Not for nothing, the eye surgeon did explain what he was going to do to numb the left eye but I don’t think I grasped the severity of it even when I saw him in front of me with a long needle in his hand. I will not share pictures of this scene because they are not pleasant to look at. I will say that having had a literal needle in my eye caused me to feel nauseous and limp with pain. Even though the poking seemed to go on forever, the next process, which was the my left eye literally being exposed over and over and over again to a blinding light, made me feel like I was going to vomit for sure. My head was splitting from this light and at one point, as the doctor promised, I could only see black where my left eye was situated which was real scary. But even with only seeing black out of the left eye, I could still feel the pain from the constant exposure to the blinding light. The surgeon told me the only way he could fix these retinal tears were to “solder” them together. He also told me I may down the road wind up with the same issue in my right eye…
That’s not anything I want to even think about right now. I’m just taking it one day at a time.
It’s post-surgery now. I’m home with a splitting headache and a left eye ache. I can do things around the house and I will work from home on my laptop a day or two but thankfully I’m not too too bad off. My eye surgeon said I will still experience floaters for the first 2 weeks and then 2 weeks after that I should be all healed. I should take Tylenol for pain and not lift anything over 10 pounds. I will go back and see him in his Hamden office at that point.
A word to the wise: If you are middle-aged and happen to see floaters or flashes which they say are common as we age, please do get yourself checked out immediately. Let the professionals tell you whether or not these black lines or cobwebs or flashes or dots are serious. I for one am fortunate that I listened to my inner voice on that fateful Friday afternoon or I might not be writing this blog post as we speak…
Sincerely,
TVFL
Wow! I’m glad you got this addressed. Thanks for sharing and the PSA we all needed.