Journal

Laser Eye Surgery: Vision normal for this stage, says eye doctor

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I visited the eye doctor this afternoon, and she took out the bandage contact lenses and checked out my eyes. She says everything is normal for this stage of PRK surgery, and that my vision should improve drastically in the next 48 hours. My cornea has healed completely, and the blurriness is caused by a slight ridge from the healing process that runs right down the center of my pupil. That should flatten out soon and my vision should be 20/20 within a couple of days.

She also said that my frustration is typical of most PRK patients, and probably more so because I read and use the internet more than most people do. So I’m a lot more optimistic (and less cranky) than yesterday.

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Laser Eye Surgery: Gradual eyesight improvement

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My eyesight has improved quite a bit overnight, and I can read text at least. It’s not perfect, but at least I’m seeing progress. I’ll probably still spend the day listening to audiobooks and watching dvds (I’m part way thorough The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was puttling me to sleep, and a mystery story that was pretty good.)

But I’m less discouraged and worried about the outcome.

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Laser Eye Surgery: Buyer’s Remorse

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I guess from what the doctor’s were saying, with the PRK surgery (as opposed to lasik, which is quick to heal) it’s fairly normal for my vision to still be pretty bad, even today and tomorrow and even on Thursday. But had I known it would take quite so long and be such a disabling and frustrating thing, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. This better fix itself, and it better be soon, and ultimately better be worth it. At this point, I’m not sure it is.

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Laser Eye Surgery: Eye Update

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Forgive me if I make more mistakes than usual; it’s rather hard to see the screen right now. After my last blog post on Saturday morning, we went to see the eye doctor, who told me my vision at that time was perfectly normal one day after surgery. I had 20/50 vision in my right eye and 20/70 in my left. It’s much worse now, though, because my eyes have started to heal, so the surface of my cornea is uneven. Yesterday my eyes really hurt. Today that seems to be over and I’m just experiencing blurriness. It’s all relative, though – even at it’s worst, the pain was tiny compared to what I’ve been through before.

The blurriness will probably remain through Tuesday, when I go to see my eye doctor (Dr. Marjorie Knotts – she’s been my optometrist for years and is very good) to take out the bandage contact lenses.

Stephanie had to go to work today, so I’m going to hang out at home cuddled up on the couch with Spike, listening to audio books.

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Laser Eye Surgery: post-surgery, day 1

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Boy I hope this gets better. My vision is somewhat improved, but not nearly what I expected. From what they said in the office, it should be 20/20 today, and then get more blurry on sunday and monday, before turning around and improving again on Tuesday, wednesday, thursday. It’s definitely not 20/20 now. In fact I’m sitting with my face up to the monitor to be able to tell what I’m typing.

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Laser Eye Surgery: Getting my eyeballs replaced

As someone at work put it. I’m getting laser surgery (specifically PKR) done on my eyes tomorrow by Dr. Waltz of TLC of Indianapolis. I’m doing my traditional “Stress relief by just not thinking about it” form of denial, so I don’t freak out. It couldn’t possibly be worse than the surgeries I’ve already had. Anyways, I’m taking several days off work – tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday (with bonus MLK day on Monday) to hang out around the house. My eyesight is pretty darned bad, and in the last few years my allergies have made contacts a pain to wear on an all-day basis. I’m completely looking forward to not being near-sighted; to be able to see while swimming, shave my legs in the shower without guesswork, and see the alarm clock better in the morning.

On Monday, I went out with some friends and saw National Treasure: Book of Secrets, starring Nick Cage, with his toupee in a prominent but uncredited role. There’s a fellow that’s had some surgery – and not in a good way. You can tell he’s going for the “Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford rakish grin” in some scenes, but it ends up looking a bit like he has gas.

And I just finished up The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, finally. That took me awhile, mainly because I just wasn’t into it after I got part way through. I gotta say, I did completely pooh-pooh the people who were dissing it as a sexist tome, but after reading it, I see what they were on about. There were several sections that really should have been written a bit less – I dunno, anti-feminine? It’s great to be all “rah rah” masculinity, but not at the expense of “rah rah femininity.” The sections on Famous Battles was great for getting me to fall asleep – if I’d been sitting in a class on it, I’d be at the back intoning “boooooooooorrrrrrrrrring!” under my breath.

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Weekend Update: 2008-01-06

Dunno what my last journal entry covered, so let me start at the top – we rang in 2008 at the traditional party at Dan and Doug’s, which is always fun and pretty low-key, and thankfully a few blocks away so we don’t have to risk life and limb. I got really toasted, but managed to not have a hangover the next day; pretty excellent. I seem to have made a dozen different resolutions lately; I’ll work on them if I remember them all. The books resolution is firmly cemented and I’m sure I’ll do well on it.

I have a new niece as of January 2nd at 3:42 a.m. My sister Stacy had her baby, named Annabelle. I’m suffering from “Twitter is killing my blogging” or I would have mentioned it before now.

Stacy's baby Annabelle

So I’m an aunt, again. Yay! Stephanie and I decided we’d get the kid started right, so we set up an ING savings account and automated it to deposit $20 ever month. After a couple of years, we’ll look at investing it. Stephanie’s Dad invested the money her family gave to her when she was a baby and she has a nice nest egg because of it, so I thought it would be good to do something similar for my niece.

This weekend we had a really full To Do list, and we managed to get a lot of it done. We put away all the Christmas decorations and finally cleaned up after all the Christmas baking and the tons of cooking we’ve done at home lately. We’ve done really well about making meals at home rather than dining out, but it does have a tendency to trash the kitchen. We got other vacuuming and cleaning done, and I managed to finally package up and get ready to mail some gifts we’ve had around the house since this summer. I completely failed to do my crime watch block leader stuff; I’ll have to get to it soon.

I had a full-blown cold after Christmas that went away, but left some sort of sinus thing in it’s wake that I can’t seem to shake. Dunno what that’s about. On January 18th, I’m going to be getting laser surgery on my eyes to correct my vision. I’ll take a few days off, but I’m not too worried about it. I have a pretty high pain threshold these days. If it doesn’t involve I giant hole in my chest, I’m not bothered.

I’m going to keep track of the movies we watch in 2008, in addition to the books I read. I’ve never really kept track before, but in reconstructing this past year’s list, it’s apparent movies aren’t really a high priority in our house. I can recall seeing 24 movies, and only 6 of them were in the theater. The bulk of our movie watching was on Netflix. I’ll reconstruct the list in another post.

This weekend we got the movie Madeline from Netflix and watched it. It’s a live-action version of the children’s book that Stephanie adored as a kid, so it’s been in our queue. It was cute but the story didn’t flow well, and we spent the whole movie analyzing what plot points came from the books. However I have had the Carly Simon theme song stuck in my head all morning, so it made some sort of impression.

I’m currently in the middle of reading The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane (a present from Stephanie’s Mom) and The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, which was a present from my friend Jen.

I’ve also been playing several different video games from bigfishgames.com. We had a coupon for free downloads with a Barnes and Noble purchase, and after playing their version of Mahjongg, I started looking at some of their other games, including Madame Fate, Mystery Case Files – Huntsville, and Mystery Case Files – Ravenhurst. They’re basically scavenger hunt-like games, where you poke around rooms and find missing items. I find them a lot more fun than war games and blowing up crap, though.

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brrrrrrr.

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we’re in Valparaiso this weekend with Stephanie’s family celebrating Christmas. It was 50 degrees yesterday; today it’s 18 with strong winds. Minus 3 wind chill. We had to put Spike’s hoodie on to take him out. Brrrrr. Yesterday we saw Stephanie’s mom and in the evening we had dinner with Veronica and Raven. Today we spend time with her friend Michelle and dinner with her dad before we head home.

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Dreaming about me

In the past week, I’ve had three different friends tell me they’ve had dreams about me. That’s very odd, to say the least, but entertaining. Our friend David said in his dream, he took me to the prom, and I was crowned queen. That’s so likely! I can picture it now. Oh, wait, no, that’s a scene from Carrie. But now I have a new goal – instead of trying to control my own dreams, I’m going to try to star more in the dreams of other people. Step one of this project involves feeding people around me lots of cheese and beans. I haven’t worked out step two, but step three is definitely “Success!” I’ll let you know how it works out.

We attended three parties on Saturday; I feel so popular. Here are photos. See, I do have friends. And somewhere along the line I caught a nasty cold and spent all of yesterday sleeping and reading. Not at the same time, of course.

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