Ablatio retinae - post scriptum

As Van Langevelde's Law dictates: things get better until they get worse. My eyesight had improved until it reached a plateau, and from there I had more and more problems seeing, and reading in particular. The optometrist concluded this was not a simple case of prescribing a different contact lens, and he sent me back to the oculist, who concluded this was a complication of my surgery of last summer: cataract.

Cataract is a well-understood phenomenon, basically the eye lens getting murky, typically a matter of time, but there are other causes, like, you guessed it retinal surgery. Nowadays, an eye lens can be easily replaced by a crystal-clear artifact, but it is not a simple do-it-yourself effort, so I had to go back into surgery.

From my point of view, the procedure was the same as last summer: my eye was anesthetised through a nasty injection in the eye, which was in turn masked by a light intravenous sedation, the sting of which was masked by an numbing ointment. Last summer, the injection into eye went by unnoticed, possibly because the eye was partly blind, but this time I saw it coming, although I did not feel any pain.

From there, the eye went blind, and I did not feel anything, other than water running across my skin, and things ran smoothly as they are supposed to be. After surgery, a cap was taped over my eye to protect it from outside violence, and I need to wear this cap during sleep for a week. Also, I need to take eye drops for a couple of weeks, and if the eye heals properly, in six weeks or so I can have a new contact lens prescribed. Looks like I survived this one.