*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Last week I blogged I was having two surgeries.  I had one surgery on Wednesday and then another on Thursday.  I have to say back to back surgeries were not fun but more importantly the second surgery is the one that took the wind out of my sails. I did ok on the first surgery.  After a couple of days I would have been fine and able to go back to work.

The second surgery I had was an eye surgery.  The official name of the surgery is called “Scleral buckle and vitrectomy”.  Don’t worry I didn’t know what it was either.  The doctor explained this is what he needed to do to repair my eye due to the detached retina.  If you are REALLY curious as to what this surgery entails I invite you to watch the following YouTube video (caution, not for the faint of heart!).

While I was in eye surgery, my wife took pictures of the video monitor where family could watch the surgery.  This is me on the operating table.  The surgery took about 1.5 hours.

After surgery I was wheeled out to the front and given some crackers and a diet coke to make sure I wasn’t going to get sick.

The next morning (Friday) at 10:30 AM I had to go into the doctor’s office to get the bandage removed.  At first I couldn’t see anything from my eye and then eventually I was able to see at least two fingers about eight inches from my face.

The good news is the doctor said and I quote: “Keith don’t take this the wrong way but you look beautiful”.  He was referring to my eye of course and that was good to hear.

So I could block out the bad eye to see with the good eye, we bought an eye patch.  The patch was worth every penny because it allowed me to at least see and get around the house.  Covering one eye though is weird as it totally messes with ones perception.  My computer time has been limited to spurts of about 5 minutes since the surgery.  As a matter of fact, it has taken me 5 days to write this blog post.  Very slow going.

Here is a picture of what my eye looked like one day after surgery.  As you can see it is totally swollen shut for the most part.  Don’t let my smile fool you, that’s the pain killers smiling!  You can’t see it from the picture but my eye is completely red. If you have watched the video, you’ll understand why.

Each day my eye has improved.  To give you an idea how things looked from my view after surgery I took the picture of me sitting in a wheel chair above and simulated what it looked like from my perspective.  The thing I couldn’t simulate was the glare, and a shut eye lid, but hopefully it’ll give you an idea.  As you can see there were big improvements the first few days and then the last several days there are smaller improvements.

DAY 1 VISION

DAY 2 VISION

DAY 3 VISION

DAY 4 VISION

DAY 5 VISION

It is going to take some time to recover.  I hope by the end of the week I can at least feel well enough to sit down at my computer in the office.  My office has lots of sun light in it and the light hurts my eyes.  Plus having four large LCDs giving off light hurts and creates lots of glare.  While I recover I’m spending my days with the lights off in the living room.

THANK YOU!

I wanted to say thank you publically to my family, friends and the community who have put me in their prayers and continued support through Twitter, Facebook, phone calls, text messages and carrier pigeons.

The next several days I’m going to continue taking it easy to get back to zero.  See you soon.