I found out yesterday that my left retina is in the process of detaching. I will be undergoing eye surgery next Thursday in hopes of correcting this problem.

This will not my first time having Eye Surgery, but it will be my first time having surgery since infancy(My last surgery was prior to the age of 3), so I am a little nervous about the situation.

Anyone have any words of incouragement or personal experience with having surgery they would like to share?

Encouragement.. hmm.. I can do this:


COME HERE!! *big fat hug*



It'll all be ok, those doctors will do a good job as they have done it hundreds and more times. Deep breath, you'll be fine.

I assume you will be under general anaesthesia, in which case you won't know or feel a thing until you wake up and it's all sorted. But good luck anyway.

Last time I had surgery, I was 7 and i had my tonsils and adenoids removed, and as I was a kid, I was sccared of pain so I freaked out like crazy, but I was under general anesthesia so I didn't feel anything. I just remember waking up and vomiting/spitting blood with no pain for over two days.

I wouldn't worry if I was you, by today's medical progresses, I can't see how this could go wrong or even hurt

Dont worry ! Keep yourself busy with other things, so not to think about it too much, & buy a very nice puzzle to comfort yourself.
Next week it will be over.

I know it's not the same, but I've had the Lasix thing done and if it's any consolation, it's over quickly and the benefits are more valuable than you can imagine. I'm sure your surgeon is great and I'm going to say it because it is part of who I am, but you're in Gods hands (NO posting religious comments please!) I'm 100% certain you'll be fine. I'll add you to my nightly prayers and can't wait to read that all went well!

Do let us know how all turns out. Godspeed.

I have a friend who had a detached retina a few years ago. If I recall correctly, the surgery was pretty straight forward. The worst part was waiting for it to heal. Apparently he wasn't supposed to look up at all for a few weeks so had to sort of hunch over and look down at everything he did. Sounds like a great opportunity to have lots of time to yourself and set a new personal best record on your favorite cube

I've had two surgeries int he last 18 months - one a myringoplasty - ear surgery to repair the ear drum, and a repair of 4(!!!!!!) hernias. The ear one was easy, although it was a 4 hour procedure. Very little pain from that - and i would imagine the eye surgery will be something similar.

My advice - same as others have said is to try not to worry. make sure you have something to do (puzzles of course!) to keep yourself busy during pre and post-op ( i found them extremely boring) and try to remember:

During the procedure, whilst under the anesthesia, you are not aware of anything, you are just letting the highly trained, highly skilled professionals do what they are experts at doing. If you have never experienced a general anesthetic before they are interesting i think. It is not like being asleep, because when you are asleep you still have a sense of time passing. With the anesthetic you don't - one moment you feel yourself starting to drift off, the next instant you are waking up again, feeling groggy. Try to enjoy that too - i find the sensation fo the anesthetic wearing off to be quite pleasant

You'll look back on this afterwards, wondering why you were concerned (as natural as it is) because the worrying about it will have been much worse than the actual procedure

Lots of books and things to keep you from being bored. I dont know how long you will have to stay in the hospital, but better to have them with you--- I was in the hospital for a while after my large intestine was pretty much halved... had my books and a pair of drum sticks with me. Ii read a lot and my rudiments wwere amazing after I got home.

Hi Jeffery,

Whilst I cannot speak from personal experience of having this sort of surgery, I have provided anaesthesia for it many times in the past (although I have not done so for the last 10 years as my special interest has taken me towards other types of surgery) so maybe I can provide some information to help you.

As you know retinal detachment surgery is provided as an urgent operation (although not a true emergency) and should be carried out as quickly as possible to prevent the peripheral detachment spreading and affecting the macula area which is the most important area. There are several different operation types: I have mostly seen cryotherapy used for mild detachments but lasers are now used to fuse the layers together at the periphery. Sometimes a small sponge is sewn on the outside of the eyeball to hold things in place and encourage the scar tissue to form. More recently the surgery has tended to be less extensive where a gas bubble is introduced into the posterior chamber and then expanded to push the retina back into place. This bubble expands initially and then gets absorbed and is quite successful for milder detachments. If it fails or is not suitable then the other technique is still possible.

These surgeries can all be performed under general anaesthesia (the commonest way in the UK) which has the advantage of loss of distress but can be fairly painful post-op (although not as bad as a fracture or a laparotomy (opening the abdomen)), it can also be associated with some fairly severe nausea depending on the anaesthetic techniques used as well as the extent of the surgery. An alternative is to have it performed under "local anaesthesia" - this is not just a few eye drops of local anaesthetic, this is a proper nerve block - the commonest one that I used to do was a "peribulbar block" which involved filling the orbit behind the eye with local anaesthetic and numbing all the nerves. There are other blocks possible too but I have not performed them myself. This nerve block sounds horrendous but having done several hundred of them I can say that it is initially a little uncomfortable and then the eye rapidly goes numb and stays that way for many hours! Mostly this surgery seems to be done under GA in the UK but this may have changed since I last performed it.

The preference as to which surgical and anaesthetic technique is used depends on you, the extent of your detachment and the doctors involved! There should be some proper discussion with you! It is moderately unpleasant surgery but improves very rapidly - it is usually provided now as a daycase procedure.
This type of surgery if done early enough is successful in about 80% of patients with a just single procedure. With additional surgery, over 90% of retinas are reattached successfully. It can, however, take several months for vision to return to its final level - hopefully this will restore the majority of your sight.

Good luck!

Surgery is really not that bad - I've had three - the most recent three weeks ago on my back. They will probably give you a medicine that makes you forget all about going into the operating room. Basically they give you an injection into your IV while you're still in your hospital room, and next thing you know you are waking up in a recovery room, being asked if you want pain medicine...

Thanks for the words of encouragement.

I have had ~18 eye surgeries in the past, though the last was about prior to the age of three(My 26th Birthday is 3 days after my surgery date), so I remember nothing of it, and the worse that came of it was Blindness in my right eye for most of my life(though I have regained light perception with the possibility of a cornea transplant giving me a usable amount of vision) and an overdose of anaesthesia(Combination for more than was sufficient for eye surgery and being put under so many times in a relatively short period), though I am hopeful that this will help restore the vision I have lost in my left eye over the last three months. If I am able to read a book within a few days of having surgery, I will consider the operation a major success, as I have completely lost the ability to read printed material since my vision started degrading. Of course, I will keep you posted on my progress post-op.

I will cross my fingers that you will be able to read a book again. I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose my sight.

Don't worry about the amount or frequency of anaesthesia now! Modern anaesthetic agents are totally different to those from 20 yrs+ ago! We can now give people daily anaesthetics for months (e.g. Burns dressing changes) or keep people deeply asleep for days or weeks on end with almost no ill effects. Modern anaesthetic agents are marvels of modern pharmaceutical science and anaesthetists skills are hugely better than ever! For example if you include my medical school training and then various medical and anaesthetic training rotations and nearly 2 years of research experience, it took me 18 years to achieve consultant status in the NHS (equivalent of attending physician in the US). This sort of experience is not uncommon. Plus I have spent another 10 years as a consultant honing my skills! Your aurgeon will have had the same sort of experiences and training too!

So with the various doctors looking after you having huge experience and with the tremendous advances in technology (drugs, equipment, monitoring etc.) you have picked probably the best time ever in history to undertake any surgery!

Good luck! I look forward to hearing of your successful recovery!

It has been six weeks since the surgery, at first, things were going quite well, with my vision seeing drastic improvements despite the removal of a cateracted lens during the surgery leaving the afflicted eye unable to focus. However, things went south about two weeks ago, and as of Tuesday, November 20th, the surgeon has confirmed that my retina has redetached. I am scheduled for a second retachment procedure on december 13th.

My absence has been due to a combination of downtime to recover from the surgery, time spent trying to find a useable screen reader, and becoming acclimated to nagvigating websites with a screen reader. Currently using Adrian Knoppix, doing most of my work within its text-based environment and using Iceweasel as my browser. All of theos Museum related links in the header made this site particularly difficult to to navigate, to the point that I have to to scroll through the forum index and thread list starting from the end of the page and moving up. I was afraid I would to get someone to put the cursor in the message in order to to write this post, but I found the message box after several minutes of searching.

Anyone know a Firefox extension that can be use to hide header and sidebar sections of the twisty puzzles website or more generally hide site navigation so I can focus on having the screen reader read through the content. In general, any tips for making website content display in a more streamlined manner would be great. Already have an agent switcher installed in order to force mobile layouts on some sites that have them but lack a mobile url.

Anyways, thanks for all of the moral support and well wishing. Here's hoping the second reattachment will hold for the duration.

Yikes, I hope the second surgery fixes everything. Best of luck, we will all be praying for you.
Wish I could help you on the extensions, but I don't know of any.

-d

I can imagine, how hard it was for you to type this message.
All the best for the second surgery!

I can only hope that the second surgery goes well. I'll pray for a successful second time around.

Went on a search for you right away.. I think what you can use is the add-on "textise"

You can see what this does on http://www.textise.net/ by entering the URL of the forum.


http://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?st ... %253D24424

That is a link to this topic.

I hope that will help out a bit, but in any case I sincerely hope the new surgery will help attach the retina for you! I'll keep you in my thoughts.

I might check out Textise at some point, but that sample page does not seem to solve the problems with the navigation header for Twisty Puzzles.com. Still quicker to shift-tab backward through the sidebar than tab through the header, and it seems to still have the problem of getting stuck in an infinite loop around the area of links for tile and marble puzzles.

Anyways, it seems the secret to finding the text box on the replay page is to tab onto the first of the little color squares to the right of the message box.

Navigating the web with Orca is not so much harder as it is annoying to figure out ways around the little quirks in some sites layouts.

On a related note, anyone know the keyboard shortcuts in Firefox/Iceweasel for the following?:olor=#000040]JEFFERY
-Opening links in a new tab. I have been using shift+return to open in a new window, but Orca sometimes gets confused about which window I want read.
-Cycling through open tabs.
-Activating the show/hide buttons used by Tvtropes, Wikipedia Mobile, and the long spoiler tags on some forums.

As for none online actvities, I was already quite comfortable with with command line and text-based applications, and Adrian's default set of applications does an excellent job of simplifying most tasks in a way that keeps them accessible to its default screen reader. Even after my vision recovers, I might continue to use Adrian instead of reverting to an actual desktop environment for day-to-day computer use.
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Good morning,

Sorry for the doublepost/bump, but I figured my fellow puzzlers might be interested in how I am doing following my second retinal retachment surgery.

The Good News: They were able to reattach the most important part of my retina, I am so far experiencing less pain than I did following the first surgery, and having already gotten acustomed to using a computer as a blind man, I have the internet to help me maintain my sanity during the recovery this time around.

The Bad News: My retina was in far worse condition, with them only able to salvage the central most portion, so I am unlikely to recover peripheral vision even in the best-case scnario. Also, the surgeon has stated that, barring some future technological advancement, this is my last chance to recover vision in this eye and that further surgery if this retachment does not hold would be a waste of time. Also, due to the more severe deteroration of my retina, initial results are far less promising(I currently only have light perception in the afflicted eye, at this point following the first surgery I was seeing color and movement as well).

Of course, even if this retachment fails, being young and living during a time of rapid technological advancement, I am likely to live to see development of technology that could succeed in improving my vision where current technology failed.

Anyways, my next appointment is Wednesday, so I should know more than.

Wow, I hope technology in this field advances quickly. I imagine it would. At the very least, computer technology for the those with vision loss will improve dramatically. I wish it had gone better, but at least you have some vision still.

I can't imagine how disheartening this all must be for you.. I too hope that technology will move on fast.. if it can make the deaf hear again, I do hope it will grow fast enough to also help the people in your shoes!

Well, they are working on stem cells for regeneration of retinas. Then there's the cyborg style optic nerve interfaced robot eye to fantasize about.

Just thinking: if you were (for some reason) awake for eye surgery/examination and they numbed your eye, it would probably be just about the scariest thing in the world. There was one episode of House where they had to stick a needle in the patient's eye. The eye was numbed but anything like that coming towards your face would probably freak you out quite a bit...

Even as someone who has been to an eye doctor countless times over the last quarter century, I must confess that much of the basic examination is still rather discomforting, and that was before the eye that was recently operated on became hyper sensitive to light and prone to watering profusely at the slightest stimuli.

Anyways, as of my most recent check up(Jan 14), what they managed to reattach of my retina was still attached. Still have little more than light perception, though my nightvision seems to be recovering somewhat, and while I still have a hyperphotosensitivity in that eye(to the point of wearing sunglasses at all time unless in total darkness), it has gotten better. My next check-up is March 5th, and I imaigine that installing a new lens will not be under consideration until april or May at the earliest, so regardless of functional recovery over the next couple of months, I will be stuck without the ability to focus.

Just like darryl, I hope there are soon some advances in technology in this area
to provide better relief and a permanent cure for such cases. Good luck with all this
procedure (which always takes a lot of extra time, energy, and requires courage)
and I am sure the lens will be fine.


Pantazis