News and Views

My mother just had surgery today for a detached retina.

I was at her house on Friday last week when she mentioned to me that she couldn’t see out of one side of her eye. There seemed to be a curtain over it.

That sounded like the classic symptom of a detaching retina, and I immediately called her ophthalmologist. They had her come in immediately. However, the doctor was unable to see any problems or damage to the retina. She referred Mom to a retina specialist, but the earliest they could get her in was the following Wednesday. The doctor seemed confident enough that it wasn’t a detached retina that waiting a few days wouldn’t hurt.

But on Tuesday Mom mentioned that the curtain had grown and was now covering almost half her vision in that eye. I immediately called the retina specialist and they had me bring her right in. This time the specialist could see that the retina was definitely detached. That was the bad news. The good news was that the detachment was in a quadrant that generally progresses slowly and there was no immediate danger of reaching the center of her vision (fovea centralis). So instead of going in that evening, he scheduled it for the following day, today, Wednesday.

So today Dale and I drove her 60 miles from her house to Sun City where the doctor performed surgery and fixed her retina.

The technique (Pneumatic Retinopexy) is interesting. There were two steps. First, he injected some gas into the eyeball. The gas bubble pushes against the retina and forces it back into place in the back of the eye. Then they shoot a laser to “weld” the retina into place. The gas bubble has to remain against the retina while it heals, so it’s important that she maintain her head in a specific orientation to bring that area of the retina up, so the bubble floats up against it. That means sleeping on her left side, which she hasn’t done in many years. She says it hurts her hips. Fortunately (?) she is taking Vicodin for the pain and so her hip shouldn’t bother her much tonight. She needs to continue this way for 7 days. Hopefully her hip will get used to it.

Prognosis is good. The surgeon said that as long as she lets that bubble do its work for a few days she should heal and recover pretty much all her vision, or at least all that macular degeneration has left her.

Now if they could have done that 55 years ago, I might enjoy watching 3D movies today.