News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

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.

National Geographic has a project called The Genographic Project. They are collecting DNA from people all over the world to “help answer fundamental questions about where humans originated and how we came to populate the Earth.” So far over a half million people have contributed DNA.

Gisele and I are also participating in this project. We sent them a DNA sample (collected from inside our cheeks). In return, they will analyze it and determine where our ancestors came from and what path they most likely followed out of Africa. They also measure the breakdown of our heritage, including the percent of Neanderthal ancestry.

Besides looking at general DNA composition, they focus on the Y-chromosome (for men) and mitochondrial chromosomes (for everyone). Since the Y chromosome gets passed down essentially unchanged from father to son, it is very useful for plotting paternal ancestry. Mitochondria, on the other hand, are contained in the mother’s egg cell and get passed down to all her children essentially unchanged, so those chromosomes can be used to plot maternal ancestry. In both cases “essentially unchanged” means that in each generation there are a few mutations that occur and get passed on and help further refine lineages.

Since my siblings all have the same Y-chromosome as I have (except Donna), and we all have the same mitochondrial DNA, my results will apply equally to them.

Here’s a video describing the project.

We just sent it in today and it takes several weeks to complete the analysis. Once we hear back I will post some results here.

Note: They do not test for any genetic diseases, etc.

Yesterday I produced more electricity than I consumed for the first time since spring. At the end of the day I was about 1.5 kWh in the black, having produced 35.5 and consumed 34.

I would have broken even several times over the past couple of weeks (as the need for air conditioning has plummeted) except for the Volt. I typically use 5 to 20 kWh driving around town, but I didn’t go anywhere yesterday.

There is a small window in the fall where I can hope to make more than I use, but as the days get shorter and we start heating the house, these days will be few. Spring is typically better since the days get longer while the weather remains mild.

The turquoise bars show generated power, green is total consumed, and dark blue is net power bought from the power company. You can see the cloudy days, where the turquoise bar is shorter.