So here we are one year after my vitrectomy surgery and everybody wants to know ,
so, what's it like ? Can you live your life ?
I think the answer is yes i can live my life, and i can live pretty well. i want to
start with the positive after my surgeries were done i had a little time this summer
and i was able to go to the beach i was able to go in the water i was able to walk the beach without
needing corrective glasses and see pretty well i was able to go on bike rides and tour the town it
was really a lovely town there in cape may and i was able to deal with traffic and see people
next to me on the bike but i felt confident enough and i could see well enough to do that
this fall i've been going for hikes i live near the appalachian trail and i love to hike in the
fall when the leaves are turning and when the leaves are falling and you get some great views
and i was able to do that so i think it's pretty good what i can what i can say though is
we are in the period of coronavirus i would be doing even more and i'd have more
leisure activities to report on if we were not in the period of coronavirus so i'm kind of limited
in the things i've done but going to the beach and going around cape may that's a lot of activity
uh using my eyes and the same with going on hikes
that is a lot of activity plus my work so that is the positive and that's where i wanted to start
the next thing i want to talk about is the timeline this is a year out and for a lot of you
you may be starting on that timeline or you may be a few weeks or months down the road on that
timeline for your vitrectomy but you want to know the whole thing you want to know all the stages
and you you want to know where you'll be at the end so let me briefly give you the timeline for me
and i'll include a link below for those of you that just want to skip
to my summary of what's different now and what's reduced a year after with the vitrectomy
but but the whole process for most people to really know where they are will probably take
about a year um and so for me last january i discovered i had a detached retina
i immediately had surgery the day after i saw the retina specialist and that involved a
long and hard recovery period from that surgery and i will include
a link below or maybe above i will include a link to go look at at the angst i experienced during
that period because you probably are feeling that angst but i don't want to redo that here
at about the three-month mark i had a checkup to determine the health of my retina and if
healing was going well and i had also at that point finally been rid of the gas bubble and
i will include a link up above to that period of time if if that's about where you are where
you have the gas bubble and you're waiting for it to leave or you're waiting for your checkup
and at that point then the next milestone was in another three months when i'd have
my two cataract surgeries i needed to find a cataract surgeon and come up with a plan
to have those surgeries i would need both eyes to have a surgery so that they would be in balance
so i also have a video from that period of time at about four and a half
to five months out and i will include a link to that rather than rehash all that here
so after that i had my cataract surgeries and there were complications and many of you will
probably have to have cataract surgeries too um because the the terectomy will advance your
cataracts uh and make you need to have them much younger than you normally would have i'm only 55
but by the time the the gas bubble was out of my eye my cataract
was from just being a slight yellow film which is normal for somebody at 55
to giving a very distorted view and so it needed to be addressed
so if you want more detail on my two cataract surgeries and the problems i had with my cataract
surgery and having the com the added difficulty of needing astigmatism uh corrective lenses
put in my eyes i could make a separate video on that but i want to stick to really the patrectomy
and and life after vatrectomy assuming cataracts uh surgeries all go perfectly
so after some surgeries and corrective surgeries to get the cataract issue and lens correct
i was then ready to start living life after a month of healing so it was about the end of
the summer and we were able to spend a week in cape may which was wonderful and then i came
back here and worked from home but i was able to work from home now i first used drugstore readers
to read but now i have prescription glasses and i have them and they are slight distance correction
on the top and on the bottom they are readers and i use those when i'm working i work in computers
my left eye is really good i see clearly with my left eye now and it's really wonderful to see at a
distance to look outside to see the birds to see the trees i love having this good distance view
it does come at a price i cannot read i can't see things this close to me
without glasses i mean i see my hand but it's too blurry to really read
so i have to hold things way out or i've got to wear glasses to read but that's okay um
for my uh peripheral vision because the uh the laser surgery that was done in the right
eye was much more extensive to repair the retinal damage than the minor laser surgery
done on the left side to reduce the chance of retinal detachment because the right side had the
actual attachment had a much more involved surgery i now no longer see this i see this in the camera
that i'm waving this hand next to my ear but i don't see it in my peripheral vision now here
that i see i can look at the camera but i see my hand so i have lost a good bit
of peripheral vision and like where it shows up if i'm mocking with somebody
and they're here at this shoulder they're walking over here and i can talk to them
i know they're there if we're talking but if we stop talking i might think they'd drop back
or i might bump into them because i really they'd really have to be in front of me for me to really
catch them in my peripheral vision so i've lost that on this side because of the extent
of lasering they did to attach the retina on that side looking straight ahead though my macula was
on which was lucky for me and he did it to get close to the macula in the in the repairs but
at least my dead on what i am staring at what i'm really focusing on with my right eye is good and
that is a matter of me being lucky that it didn't get to the macula or didn't happen at the macula
versus some people who will have
a different location for their detachment or a problem with immaculate so
that is a loss and the other loss that i see on this side is in bright light in
perfectly wonderful light i see really good with this eye and really good with with my left eye now
it's becoming evening and there's still light there's still plenty of adequate light to see
but now what changes is it's a little bit harder to see in low light with the left eye but it
becomes much harder to see in low light with the right eye and now what i am looking at i can still
focus on i can still concentrate on it and it is pretty clear but what is around it all that
space over here to the right now is more blurry more out of focus more disorienting
the other disorienting thing i notice is walking from room to room in a house i'll be in one room
with the lights on and i don't need to turn the lights on in the next room or in the hallway
and just going from a well-lit room to a room that's not there is disorienting this is all
blurry over here feeling until i get back to another a well-lit room so that is another
feeling sensation that i have with the rep the retinal detached eye and the vitrectomy eye
the other thing that is um disturbing with it is um seeing waves in things
that should have perfectly straight lines so maybe i'm reading text across the page
and it'll wave a little bit letters might scrunch a little bit i'll be looking at a doorway and i
know that the moldings and the door is perfectly straight and yet i will see little ripples or
indentations that i know aren't there those are really minor and actually those are something i
had in the early phases that were more extreme that are less extreme now but they're still
there and i think they're going to stay there i think they will they will always be there
the other thing which i actually find comforting and it's kind of weird but i uh when when it's
really dark at night and when i go to bed i've had the lights on turn them off it's pitch black
and i go to bed i have this soft green glow on the right side of my face so i'm there laying in bed
and uh i see i see this little glow below my head or if i sleep on the other side there's this
little glow above my head i kind of like it but i think it represents my vision loss
but that's that's like a side effect that i have um uh reading uh is good but it's because my left
eyes is bearing most of the burden when i close this eye and i read with my readers with my right
eye i can do it and the letters are relatively clear but they're slightly distorted even though
they're clear i think it's related to some of that waviness that i was talking about
so uh that is my basic summary of how it is for daytime and evening
light when it comes to night time and when it comes to driving uh let me finish with daytime by
saying driving i'm surprised at how comfortable i am but i think the thing with driving is um
peripheral vision has some importance but when you're moving forward something that
comes at you right from the side there's just nothing you're going to do about it even if you
get a glimpse of it in your peripheral vision so it's looking ahead plus a little to the side and
when you want to look to the side and driving i'm turning my head anyway when i really want to see
i'm not going to trust what i think i see in peripheral vision even my left side
i'm going to turn my head so i feel confident by day with my uh driving and it's easier for
me to take my glasses off to drive because what i find is if i have my glasses on
then this stuff is all perfectly clear and this stuff is a little blurry
and my glasses do a slight correction for above but they're for reading down here
and it's just easier it's just easier to drive without my glasses i see much better
and by daytime that's fine that the correction that my glasses give me is so minor for daytime
that i i feel more confident without them now at night it's a little bit different at night
um i can still see well um if i know where i'm going but what i notice is reading street signs
with my glasses off or even with them on but seeing things too low in the lens is
things will streak out to the side so a reflector on the road will streak outward
the reflective lettering on signs will streak upward and it'll be hard to read and what i have
to do which is really annoying is when i'm driving at night i gotta talk my chin down
and look at the top of my glasses or put my glasses down my nose and look out this part
to see clearly so i don't know if i need like driving glasses or something like that
for at night but what i found is if i don't really need to read the signs um i
like signs are the worst um but i see pretty good it's hard to explain there's a there's a
streakiness to to the signs and to headlights but i still see good so i feel confident even driving
at night except if i was going somewhere where i didn't know and i needed to see the street signs
i would either wear my glasses and get a kink in my neck or that's the next thing i need to talk
to my optometrist about i need to say i wonder if i need glasses for driving at night because
the the the multi-purpose reading and distance glasses it's just too not enough
distance and i have to create crank my neck to i have to crank my neck to see what's above me so
um my belief for going forward is that i am not going to see a lot of change or improvement um
i believe that my left eye is going to be what gets me through most things and my right eye
is just there for benef extra benefit i'm glad i have it i'm glad i have this vision
but in every way when i measure it it's not as good as my left but i'm grateful to have it and
i think it's really uh i'm lucky to live now and not a hundred years ago when this could be saved
and probably 100 years ago my right eye i'd be blind and probably the same thing would have
happened in my left eye without the preventative surgery so on the one hand i'm really grateful
on the other hand a lot of you have asked what could have been done differently what could i have
done differently what could your doctors have done differently to avoid this if that's something you
want me to talk about it's another thing to let me know in the comments or send me an email so if you
want to know more about my cataract surgery and my cataract surgery issues complications that whole
track i could do a video on that and i could just do a video on what i think about
prevention i could do that but i don't want to bother you with that if nobody's interested in it
but since so many people wanted to know what's it like now
uh i wanted to do this video so i hope you're doing well
and i hope that this video has been helpful to you and
if you are somewhere on this journey up to a year and you're wondering what will it be like
each case is different i didn't have macula off i think everything went well i didn't have scarring
along the excessive scarring along the way that required my procedures to be redone so i'm lucky
but and hopefully and probably you'll be there too so hopefully this is a help to you to know
that i'm at least one more person who got through this and is able to have a pretty fun life and do
a lot of the things that i used to do before this all happened and i'm not afraid i'm not afraid
super afraid that i'm going to lose my vision and i'm not afraid that i can't see well enough to be
safe so one more thing i want to add it's also easier to take a walk in the woods without my
glasses you know you can look down and see the the leaves and the branches pretty clearly but
when you're in the woods you want to look down a little bit and look ahead and i have to do the
same thing kind of with my uh with driving i have to really look down to see clearly the the twigs
and and the rocks when i'm taking a hike versus looking straight ahead so when i go for a hike
i take off my glasses because this is too blurry when i'm looking at the ground through
this part of my glasses so rather than look down and look up and look down and look up
i just take the glasses off and it's much better
okay good luck let me know if there's anything i really should have told you
that you really wanted to know at this point and it didn't occur to me that you would
and i'll try to answer that in the comments and i wish you all the best of
luck