Half of View.

Recently,
My retina completely detached in my right eye. This was not painful in and of itself.
Here is a site that will explain the parts of the eye for those of you, like me, who forgot about biology a little.
Eyeball diagram.
Retinal Detachment

You can read about what it is in the links above, but basically:
About a month and a half ago, I noticed that something about my vision was off, not quite right. Me, being the non-alarmist I am, thought nothing more of it than that it would go away with time because it was probably just from staring at my computer screens for extended periods of time. After a couple of weeks with no change except for my gradual realization that it was just in the right eye, and it was really messed up, I decided to go to the student health care clinic on campus.

The doctor at the campus clinic, well I should say, every health care professional at the clinic, was shocked by my blood pressure and pulse rate. Of course they lectured me about smoking. The doctor that saw me immediately thought that I had vascular damage in my eye.
"You'll never see out of that eye again." she said.
I had done a little research online and suggested that it might be a torn retina based on the symptoms I was experiencing. Next thing I know, I am at the LSU Eye clinic seeing my three new favorite doctors, Dr. AJ (sp), Dr. Gershack and the retina specialist himself, Dr. Gregorian.

When Dr. Gershack, a young looking doc, peered into my fully dilated eye for the first time, he said "WOW!"
They told me I would have surgery in a week and that I had about 60% chance of seeing out of that eye again.
Now I have an air bubble in my eye which is supposed to be pressing the retina back into place (read more in the links above) and I totally can't see out of that eye. The vision in that eye is so bad, that I have taken to wearing an eye patch over it so that my lid muscles don't hurt from closing it all the time. I think that the recovery is going well, but there is apparently no way to tell for a while, like 6-8 months. I'll tell you how it goes.

Photos

January 20th 2007.
My guess is that this is a Saturday morning. Out at Earthshare Gardens on diocese property building a greenhouse from the ground up. We started with holes. I want to say three feet deep, but it could have been more. Then we put posts in them and filled the holes with cement. Rails at ground level and the top of the poles kept them level. Next we bolted fence poles that had been bent into an arch to each pole on one side. With all of our might we bent the other side of the fence pole to the post on the other side. It was dangerous and sucked. I think that was all we did that weekend. The next weekend we went out again to put a front and a back on to the thing and stretch visqueen across it.

January 20th, 2008

At this moment I was on my way to Renaissance to run sound. It was probably cold and I was probably tired. I walked past this kitchy store that I walk by a lot, but tonight for some reason, I noticed this. If the picture is not clear enough, that is a merman that resembles Pee Wee Herman.

All of this to say that I have pictures available to view here. http://picasaweb.google.com/jmatthewroberts