Marchie's World

Hi folks. I'm sitting here (at home) recovering from eye surgery.

Back in January, I was running around getting ready for our cruise when I realized I only had a couple sets of contacts left. So, I went down to our brand new Walmart (it had just opened up THAT day!) to use their eye center since the doctor I used the previous year couldn't see me for a couple of days. No big deal, right? Read this line, read that line, blah blah, bing bang boom, here's your prescription, right? Not so fast!

The doctor dilated my eyes for whatever reason during the exam and kept asking me to look up and to the right and asking me questions like, had I ever been hit in the eye? do I ever see black spots or floaters in my vision? The answer to all was no. Finally he tells me that it appears that I have a partially detached retina in my left eye and wanted me to go see a specialist as soon as possible. Basically, that meant nothing to me, as I really didn't know much about the anatomy of an eye, but the fact that he wanted me to be seen asap concerned me a bit.

For those of you who, like me, didn't have any idea of what that meant, your retina is the 'skin' for a lack of better term that lines the inside of your eyeball. For some unknown reason, some fluid got under the retina causing it to detach from the rest of the eyeball in that area. "Luckily" it was only on the bottom part of the eye, so it didn't have to fight gravity to stay put until we fixed it.

So here's the kicker. What's the big deal, right? Is there a problem with having a partially detached retina, since obviously I was having no problems with it, RIGHT? Wrong. Apparently it has caused me to lose a small part of my vision permanently, and I hadn't even noticed since it was such a gradual thing. I have no vision to the upper right in my left eye. "Luckily" it hadn't come into the main part of my vision *YET*. If the detachment got any worse, the black area would eventually (or suddenly) cover my entire field of vision (just in that one eye).

The doctor's recommendation was to have it repaired by way of installing a scleral buckle around my eye. Essentially, the buckle is a plastic band they put around the circumference of my eye (side to side, not front to back) that will be there forever. The buckle holds my eye in a certain position and the doctor lasered the detachment and drained the fluid from it to keep it from creating a larger detachment.

So, that was Thursday. I went down to Beaumont-Royal Oak Hospital and had outpatient surgery. I was pretty nervous and felt quite scatter-brained going in to it. First and foremost, the very slight chance of death as is the chance with any surgery had me crossing my t's and dotting my i's. Then I was a little worried about surgery itself because I've never had anesthesia before. The very slight chance of going completely blind in the one eye had me nervous all the way til they took the patch off the next morning. Once the patch came off I knew I was in the home stretch as far as risk goes.

Today is Saturday, and I can *almost* do without having any tylenol for the occasional discomfort I get. I am not allowed to drive for at least a week, along with working out or doing anything too strenuous. I go back in on Wednesday for my follow up exam.

I don't know if you really WANT to see this, but here is a link to a pictures of my eye if you're curious. There is just one pic from each day after the surgery to show the progress so far, starting with the one of my eye QUITE dilated before surgery. The rest are from after they took the patch off, so be warned, they are a little gross. Our photosite
I didn't put it as a public page, so you won't find it on the main page of our site. I didn't think people would like to accidentally happen upon those pictures while looking for pictures of the kids or something :lol:

Here are some links to more technical info on the surgery:
One
two
Don't worry, these sites don't have any pictures, just a few illustrations on the one site.

Well, we've survived :) With no real heartaches or headaches (but definitely MUSCLE-aches) we held a hell of a yard sale on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I am so glad we've gotten rid of all of the stuff we did, without just throwing it away.

Now, the amount of stuff that IS left is so much less, and it all will go to the Salvation Army (for some reason, I can never see that name in writing and NOT think of "Dumbledore's Army", but I digress). The next thing I need to do is see if they will come to pick it up from us. There are some things I am going to try to sell on ebay or Craig's List, but I told Archie that that stuff will stay in the garage, and will not come back in the house. The deal is, if it is still there (meaning I haven't gotten rid of it) when it's time for us to move (hopefully around the end of this year), then it will get donated as well.

Now we have all kinds of room in our closets and basement to put MORE junk... er, I mean stuff :)

My brain's been running double-time lately. We're trying to get ready to hold a yard sale next weekend (well, Thurs-Sat), and the last few weeks I've been saying to myself that I can do all of these misc things that I keep thinking of "right before the yard sale"... Well, guess what, it's right before the yard sale. Oy. Luckily I have stopped trying to depend on my memory and have become a list person... at least when it comes to preparing for events like this. Mommy-brain has fully set in and taken my ability to remember anything critical. Though, for some reason I can still remember account numbers and phone numbers from our clients at Winifred Donahue's Answering Service in Princeton circa 1992, as well as birthdays of some of my classmates in High School. Puzzling.

Over the past two weekends Archie and I have gone through our piles of stuff in the basement and have probably reduced it by around 50%. His company will likely be pleased whenever we move again to see the moving bill has gone down. Though, I think what we are losing in misc junk from the basement, we have gained in toys and children's clothes :lol: No, not really, but it certainly is a big chunk of stuff.

I am trying to be truly editorial though and REALLY be honest about whether we're really ever going to use a lot of stuff. Our motto is EVERYTHING'S GOTTA GO! A good chunk of stuff will be going to the Salvation Army if it does not sell so we don't wind up in the same mess we're in now. So, in order to save ourselves a lot of hauling afterwards, we're going to be making some good deals. My theory is that there are two kinds of yard sales - one is when they're trying to make money and the other is when they're trying just to get RID of the stuff. We're the latter. Oy.