bad hit 2nite.

bad hit 2nite.

What’s It All About?

  

  

Once again I'm way overdue; I believe this is finally now become the rule to the exception.

There has been so much talk over the past several months regarding my consideration and decision to undergo tear duct surgery in my right eye, that I now realize I did not share nearly any of that with my extended family and friends. What follows, will hopefully reflect a coherent reasons and intentions as to why I chose surgery.

Over 15 years ago, it will be 16 years this coming September, I would very occasionally have to contend with what appeared to be a blocked and/or infected right eye tear duct. During the first few years, I would encounter these blockages once a year on average, and though we did not seek medical attention for it most of the , we didn't treat it is logically as we could and after 3 to 5 weeks, the blockage/infection would release and within a few days, my eye would return to normal operation. Over the years, these blockages and infections have happened 2 to 4 times a year in the same eye, and besides the increase in frequency of occurrences, the blockages became more painful, larger and more visible in the corner of my eye.

Here comes the graphic…

This scan shows what the surgery was/for:
The red area in the mid/lower right shows the existing partial blockage.
The yellow coloration shows the bone that was removed.
The green represents the solid plastic tubing that was inserted to create a new pathway for the tears to flow into the nasal cavity. The stitches will be removed in a week and the tubing will be removed in 6 weeks or so.

In what certainly appeared to be an escalation of a problem, the last time that I had to contend with one of these infections, it lasted four or five weeks and concluded with a five day migraine, the likes of which I had never experienced ever before and do not want to experience ever again. It was at this point that we pursued an ophthalmologist and did not settle with the familiar "keep the heating pad on it and massage until painful or it opens". It was during this time in our investigation, but I began to develop the disposition, not unlike that which I have in dealing with dentists... don't like them. This next part is not so nice; for an ophthalmologist or eye surgeon to verify the flow of one's tear duct, said ophthalmologist or eye surgeon must insert a needle into the tear duct opening in the inside corner of your eye and, once said needle is inserted and KEEPING it inserted, they then must change its placement/position and angle of trajectory so that they can use the syringe to force water through the tear duct and verify that it is either open, partially blocked, mostly blocked or completely blocked. This stinking hurts, end of story.  The only times that I ever found it mostly bearable was when the ophthalmologist would use numbing eye drops in an effort to numb the tear duct opening. This, unfortunately, was only ever sometimes marginally successful. After a few months of these types of blockage tests, it became clear that the logical next step was to try and fix the problem with surgery. That is what we did last Thursday morning in the main operating room at Morse Ave. Kaiser.

We went into the surgery as prepared as we possibly could have been, but during recovery more lessons were learned, as is the trend when you live with HKPP. The only thing that we did not completely prepare for, was clarifying which narcotics and nausea medicine works best on me... needless to say, what they were prepared with and what I was in need of were entirely different medicines, so when I came out of the general anesthetic, while in the recovery room, I did not transition from one numbing medicine to another; the pain relief simply wore off very quickly and my muscles began to lock up because of the intense pain that was not being managed because the medicines that are standard protocol in their recovery room are medicines that have no physical effect on me. That was a very, very hard few hours with a handful of nurses and technicians who knew zero about my condition and who were stumped as to why my pain was escalating and not decreasing. Ultimately, it would have been in my best interests to have proactively asserted into my chart and paperwork, what quantities of which pain medications work with me and which ones don't. The information is already in the chart, but you have to look for it, and in an ER, an ambulance and/or recovery room, there is very little time spent with the patient one-on-one with their medical chart open right to the page that answers all of those questions.

It is not my fault, but it is something that I could have affected to my benefit had I thought it that much further through.

 

Ok, it's that time. 1:31 AM and my night meds are just beginning to work, finally.

 

Peace-

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday through Sunday

 

Tear duct surgery to create a new tear duct passage for my right eye. 

Ixney Unfey.

 

eye surgery = wow. impressive

eye surgery = wow. impressive pain

Surgery

It's 4:24 AM and we are heading in to Kaiser for my tear duct surgery this morning...mild anxiousness but I know Who holds me.  Once I am able, I will catch this up in better form.
peace-
w