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Day of Detachment
Holy hell what a day! For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter (@bradwaller), today was a day to forget. My plan was simple: drop my daughter off at school and head off to Santa Barbara for CJU so I could check into the hotel and man the PMA table at the expo. That got blown away last night.
I’m in the process of getting LASIK and Monday was my final exam before my scheduled procedure on Thursday. After four months of wearing glasses to prepare, I’m really ready to get this done with. Part of the final exam was dilating my eyes and checking the retina. The doctor saw some spots that she was not comfortable with and told me I had to see a specialist. This was a few minutes after 5 PM last night. The specialist’s office closed at 5. Crap.
I got in to the retinal specialist at 8:30, expecting maybe an hour or so appointment that would still give me ample time to get my stuff and head off to Santa Barbara since it is about a two-hour drive under normal non rush-hour traffic. Two hours later the doctor is telling me that I have a slight retinal detachment and he’ll take care of it right away. Just a little LASER blasting to re-attach the retina around the flap where the fluid was getting under the retina. Pretty minor and LASIK should not be a problem after the procedure.
Another hour or so later, I’m in the room with the YAG or Argon LASER (I’m pretty sure it said 532 nm) waiting for the doctor to come in and do the deed. The device is pretty cool. He wears the same microscope goggles used for an exam, but it is fitted with two LASERs. A red for aiming and the green for “photocoagulation”to create small burns around the edges of the tear, producing scars which will hopefully seal the borders of the tear and prevent fluids from leaking toward the retina.
The worst part of the procedure was not the really bright green light, but the Q-tip he used to jam behind my eye to press on the back side to I assume get fluid to flow out and get the LASER to seal the retina. THAT was painful. It still hurts 12 hours later. I wonder if I’ll have a bruise tomorrow.
It only took a few minutes for me to guess that the repair was not going as smoothly as I thought when he kept calling out high power numbers for the LASER and it got brighter and brighter until my eye was overloaded and went dark. That was actually easier since the bright light made it hard to keep my eye open and look to the top right and hold that while he prodded and zapped.
Luckily, vision came back pretty quickly, albeit everything was purple and dark. It slowly got better, but was still pretty blurry. I postponed my LASIK appointment and set up a one month checkup to see if the reattachment took. Now of course it was almost noon and I was really late. I rushed home and gathered my stuff and ate a quick lunch. If I was really lucky and traffic was light and I broke the speed limit by 10 miles per hour I might make it to CJU by 2 PM when I was supposed to man the PMA booth.
Of course this didn’t happen and I finally made it to the Fess Parker at about 2:30. Thankfully, word got out that I was late and a few of the other volunteers were at the booth. Already exhausted, I went to work at the booth and eased into trade show mode. I put in some time and made sure the other volunteers had things handled and got a chance to look for some goodies for my daughter (don’t tell her yet - I said there weren’t going to be any) and talk to people at the expo.
The expo was a mini show floor with lots of basic tabletop displays where you could learn about merchants and OPMs who all work in the CJ universe. Walking the tables was tough because I wanted to talk business and also educate them about the PMA at the same time. Lots of talking and I got to meet some great people and get a few pledges of varying support for the trade association.
I then headed off to the Zoo for the cocktail mixer with Lisa Picarille and Connie Berg where we sampled the delectable food (I’m not sure if the mini-Reuben or the skewered beef was better) and wandered the grounds. After a few hours of networking and talking to old and new friends I was beat and ready for the hotel, where you find me writing this…
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