Add new comment

An update to my OHMYEYE shield featuring 2 shields.

Warning! Long rambling story ahead. If you want the shields you can skip ahead and download them as an attachment at the end of the post.

So, here is how my second surgery went. I was really relatively relaxed since I knew my left eye wasn't nearly as bad as my right. BUT SUDDENLY! The nurse/surgery technician/whatever went to put an IV in my left hand. She can't do it. She calls over the anesthesiologist to put the needle in. He tries my right hand, right next to the spiffy bruise left from surgery #1. Nope. I ask why the hands are used and they said it was more convenient for them. "Oh well" I say to myself, "go ahead and stick 100 needles in, as long as it's "convenient" for you. It's not like those IV needles hurt or anything, especially when they get WIGGLED looking for the vein". I tell them that they will have better luck with my elbow.

So the anesthesia doc tried my forearm. No luck, and I still have the bruise a couple of weeks later (it's a nice shade of green now, very faint). Finally he starts poking around my right elbow and remarks on the scarring. I said I had been very ill in 2012 with a throat abscess that *nearly* destroyed one of my cervical vertebrae and spread to other parts of my body causing septic arthritis. Then I mention the removal of the vertebrae and how I had to wear one of those "metal dealies" on my head for 7 weeks. And the doctor LAUGHS at me! Perhaps the term "metal dealies" was particularly amusing.

So, I'm like OMG! I casually mention that if the vertebrae had been completely destroyed by the infection that I could either have died or been paralyzed from the neck down. He doesn't laugh at that but hey, he did find a vein to use in my elbow, where I told them to go to in the first place. So he injects some sort of relaxant in my arm, and I actually start feeling relaxed and nice. BUT SUDDENLY! The doctor and nurse return to inject the medication that will numb and immobilize my eye, (sort of like Novocaine at the dentist office).

He injects this very large needle into my eye socket, just beneath my eye AND DOESN'T USE LIDOCAINE OR SOME OTHER SURFACE NUMBING MED FIRST. Nope, we're just free wheelin it. They keep telling me to keep my eye open (you try keeping your eye open with a 10 foot long needle stuck in it. I might be exaggerating). This goes on for what seems like an hour but was only a minute or so, I guess. My relaxed and nice feeling has left the building and has been replaced by anxiety, pain, confusion and being really really pissed off. I have to use eye drops and it hurt my eye to roll it back to use them for three days after. The nice anesthesiologist from the first surgery wasn't working that day and I really MISSED him. He knew how not to hurt people with 10 foot long needles.

After all that, the surgery was anticlimactic. The nurse-anesthesiologist was pretty nice and gave me more relaxing med stuff. It took about 5 or 10 minutes and when I got out, I had TWO boxes of cranberry juice. Whoop de do. Here is a pictoral summary of the injection dealie. (There I go with "dealie" again. Hilarity ensues!)