Eyes of Blue

Doesn't look blue to me

I had to wear the eye cup to sleep last night. Not so horrible. But as the anesthesia wore off, it was increasingly more painful to administer eye drops. Less so this morning. My friends drove me to my follow-up appointment. Everyone else in the waiting room was also wearing eye cups! Everyone else is older than me, because cataracts and glaucoma are traditionally old people diseases. Thanks mom.

However, the doc is surprised and impressed that my eye pressure is actually low for post-surgery. Normally, with inflammation and what not, especially bruising from having force the eyelid open wider than normal, eye pressures rise temporarily. Mine measured between 12 and 14, which is great. My vision is still horribly blurry in that eye. Thank goodness my good eye, the right eye is the dominant eye and sees just fine. It's pressure is still at 17, not great, but not an emergency-reading either.

My son and my friend both tell me that my left eye has a blue cast to it now. Weird. I can't actually see it because it's hard to focus on that, even with my good eye. My son takes a photo and shows me. I can see that the eye indeed looks different, but not actually blue. Oh well... The sclera on the outside is all red and my eye actually looks smaller than I'm used to, like it shrank a bit. Super weird.

My doc tells me she wishes she could install the stent in my right eye without resorting to cataract surgery because of my uncompromised vision. We briefly discuss the new MIGS, micro stents for glaucoma that are inserted without cataract surgery, but they're so new that she'd rather try them out with a patient with less severe glaucoma. I agree. I don't want to be the guinea pig! But I'm hoping to get this resolved this year so that my health insurance deductible will be fulfilled, and I won't need to worry about this particular health issue any more.

Meanwhile, my doc, knowing I'm on 6 different eye drops, decided to replace two of them to make my life easier. Three drops had to be administered 4X daily for the next several weeks. Now I only have 1 drop, an antibiotic with that schedule. Her office gives me 2 other drops that require only once daily, and twice daily. That's so much easier than 4X a day! Plus my other 3 glaucoma drops that are twice daily. But I have to mark each bottle and lay them all out on the table so that I not only remember which ones to take, but when to take them!

I keep testing my operated-on eye, hoping to get my vision back to "normal"... I can make out letters now, but not actually read anything more than titles on packages and street signs. Still, that's better than this morning, when everything was blurry! Looking at my computer with the left eye makes all the letters look like I'm reading Cyrillic. Ugh.