Oh, yes, it’s a pity cannons aren’t made of brass any more - if they were, I might get off on offing them if I offered their bodies to the army for free, raw materials are expensive… (boy, there sure were a lot of ff in that sentence!)
rachelellogram, if your Mom’s eyes are sucking anything, they most definitely need surgery! I hope it all goes well, eye surgery isn’t something about which you commonly hear much in the way of complications.
Thanks. I am having eye surgery in 4 weeks. I was not looking forward to it anyway.
Gah! I’m sorry to hear that, rachellelogram. Eye surgery scares the crap out of me. I’ve never needed it and I hope I never do. I just keep seeing that scene from Un Chien Andalou and know that I CAN’T NOT SEE whatever is coming at my eye during eye surgery…I get through other minor medical/surgical procedures in which I’m not knocked out cold by closing my eyes and thinking of something else. Can’t do that with eye surgery.
What kind, out of curiosity? Some are really common and pretty simple to recover from, like cataract surgery. I know it doesn’t make it less scary, but some of these surgeries are done so often that they’re routine for doctors to do.
Thanks, guys. I’m not sure exactly what the procedure is. I do know that she has bleeding and scar tissue in there. She regularly has needles inserted into her eyes, as she’s diabetic and has eye bleeds on a fairly regular basis, but this is more serious.
I am worried because my boss had an eye procedure done where they removed his vitreous fluid and replaced it with saline or something… a spore somehow got introduced into the needle, infection ensued, and he went blind in that eye within a day.
Wow, that’s the second time I hear of someone having any kind of trouble with eye surgery, but the other one was someone who needed so much correction she had to get a second, “touch-up” surgery (which was covered under the initial payment).
Mine went fine, David’s went fine, Aunt Mari was one of the first people in Spain to have vision correction surgery and it went fine (and in her case it was so necessary that Social Security paid for it), she later had cataracts surgery and it went fine, Littlebro’s went fine, my grandmother’s cataracts surgery went fine, my Miami landlady’s cataracts surgery went fine (and the woman’s medical file was so thick it should’a been hardcover)… all of them were stuff that’s routine now, some of them were absolutely cutting-edge when they took place, statistics say your mother ought’a be fine too - good eye health vibes and all that jazz sent!
OK, it sounds like she has diabetic macular edema, diabetic retinopathy, or perhaps age-related macular degeneration. The injections are probably something like Lucentis or Avastin to stop the leakage of fluid and blood in the back of her eye, and that’s pretty standard.
What your boss had is called endophthalmitis (essentially just means an infection in the eyeball), and it’s really, really rare. The doctors I work for haven’t had any cases among their own patients that I’ve ever heard of, and have seen some that are referred in from elsewhere. Ophthalmologists take precautions to avoid it, including antiseptic washes of the eye, use of antibiotic eyedrops after the procedure, sterile instruments, etc. As you know, however, it’s still a possibility. Your mom needs to follow whatever post-procedure care instructions she’s given, including using antibiotic eye drops, and to call the doctor’s office ASAP if she notices any urgent symptoms that they might warn her about. Endophthalmitis is considered an emergency situation for ophthalmologists, and they will treat it as such. She should also not touch her eye for a while afterwards - barring any explicit instructions from the doctor on what she might need to do for eye care - including not touching the tip of the eyedrop bottle to her eye when putting drops in.
What surgery they might be doing depends on what exactly is going on. She might be having a membrane removed from the back of the eye that’s interfering with vision, and might even be tugging on the retina, which distorts vision and may eventually tear the retina, risking major vision loss. That’s just one guess.
Oh, and the procedure your boss had is called a vitrectomy - for various reasons, the vitreous gel in the eye may need to be removed and swapped out with saline. Sometimes it’s because some people get so much debris in there - old floaters and such - that they can’t see well.
jayjay: Eye injections are given with just topical anesthetic, but most surgeries (not including LASIK, though you can get Valium or something for that) have either conscious sedation, or general anesthesia for really complex stuff.
Yeah I figured that the infection+blindness was a huge outlier, otherwise they wouldn’t do these surgeries on a regular basis. But it’s bad for my confirmation bias to know someone it happened to.
My grandma’s cataract surgery went well too, and that was… 10? years ago.
I’m so stressed out with trying to get time off work for this, because she lives an hour and a half away from me and the surgery center. uuuugh. The ironic (and most pit-worthy) part of it all is that she has a boyfriend with tons of availability, WHO IS LEGALLY BLIND AND CAN’T FUCKING DRIVE. I’m sure there’s a hilarious joke to make about that, but I’m in no mood.
I’m sorry you’re having to deal with all of this stress, and that your mom has to go through this. 
I’ll be thinking about the both of you.
Thanks, Ferret. That was a lot of great information 
I’m bottling up all my frustration, because I can’t take it out on her when it’s not her fault. It’s nice to vent.
One more follow-up regarding my dental insurance.
Spoke with my dentist’s insurance clerk this morning, and yes, they take Cigna, which will be my employer’s new medical/dental insurance provider.
So, very pleased about that.
I didn’t bring up the message I had left last Friday for her to call back, and she didn’t bring it up, so no way of knowing if she even got the message. But never mind that, I’m just happy they take Cigna.
You might want to rethink your choice of words there.
May I say that this all sounds positively medieval?
I don’t see why - at least, not in comparison to any other field of medicine.
Unless you mean the general body horror related to anything affecting eyes, that is. I’ve seen oncologists cringe at the mention of such things, and I used to feel that way until I got into the field. Eyeballs are tougher than you think!
Listen Professor Bitch, if the mere mention of a tutor invokes the suggestion that “online learning is not for you” you can heartily kiss my ass. Before you get all snippy and tell me to look in the syllabus, why not post the actual info there first? Stuff like a name, a location and link to hours?
Bitch.
Putting it here because I don’t know where the annoying commercials thread disappeared to…
CREEPY! CREE-PY! That’s what the Pudding Face ads for Jello Pudding are. CREEEEEEEEEPY!
Oh gourd, that reminds me… I was having a conversation with someone online last night, who during a discussion of higher learning casually mentioned that he was going to “comunity colage.” And he isn’t just a careless typer, he really is that stupid. Nice guy… but seriously, man? One of the admission requirements for any college should be SPELLING IT. :mad:
Yes, the general horror of anybody sticking needles in, or cutting on, my eyes makes me long for the days of leeches and trepaning.
For the guy at the Fred Meyer fish counter yesterday: the counter person who was stocking the display case is not responsible for corporate decisions. Your beligerant confrontation of her (“the store is open and full of customers, but you don’t have the fish and prices in the case yet?!”) because the cases weren’t set up ahead of time was out of line. When she explained that it was management policy and that personally she’d rather come in an hour earlier, you yelled at her: “but I don’t get to talk to ‘management’, I have to talk to YOU!”
Why don’t you just take your childish, self-important bullshit up to the customer service counter, instead of berating someone who is just doing her job? Oh, right, because you feel it’s your right to harangue just anybody who happens to be in front of you. Even after she reeled off the types of fish she had and the price per pound from memory, including the stuff on sale, you continued your little hissy fit. She finally asked you if you actually wanted to buy some fish, and your last bit of rudeness was “gimme some salmon”. What a charmer. I wouldn’t last a day in retail sales.
My mom had cataract surgery when I was in elementary school. I came home from school one day and she was sitting in the living room with a patch over her eye. She told me that she had to be both awake and keep her eyes open the whole time. About the point where she said something about “looking at the inside of your eye is really interesting,” I was scarred for life. Then she let me look at the lens they took out which I thought was neat.
Now for my rant: one of my roommates is going to give me some extra money on this month’s cable bill to cover the PPV porn he got. Dammit, guys, that’s what the internet is for!