Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Buster 3.0 and eye surgery round three, a doubleheader...

I speak to you as the proud owner of my third prosthetic foot, crafted for me by Mark, my gifted limb expert extrordinaire. It is the right size, lighter and I am level when I stand on it. The thing is, breaking it in has prven to be a touch painful and after spending a few hours in it today it was necessary for me to remove it and go to Buster 2.0 for the eye surgery, so's the discomfort from the leg did not translate into my twitching in pain at the inopportune moment and going from being fully sighted to a cyclops.

It is adorned with the Oilers logo, which is something I had wanted since I saw a YouTube video about a man in my hometown of Pittsburgh get a foot that had the Penguins logo just before their 2008 Stanley Cup finals bid. In my case, the good fortune of having the Oilers continue on to the post-season is not in the cards, but by the end of the summer Mark tells me we'll be ready for a different suspension and for at least the first few games I can display the leg in all it's glory until the weather goes cold and grey.

Round 3 of the laser repair of my eyes occured today as I mentioned and like the last time, it went in a perfunctory, assemply line fashion. Dialate, read, wait, strap into frame, the click-click-click-click. This time is was a "grid" procedure. Now not being a doctor I naturally don't know what the hell that means but judging by the number of times he shot my eye with the laser, I can guess that this procedure was to get the smaller areas of leakage in my eyes as opposed to the larger, more obvious ones. Like before I lost count after around 20 clicks, so the damamge was rather extensive, I would suppose.

The difference in todays procedure as opposed to the other times I've been "under the...(laser) gun" is that I felt discomfort this time. Not throttling, disabling pain or anything like that, but a sensation not unlike allergies after you cut the grass outside or handle a shedding cat for a period of time, things like that. Now it's fading away and my vision is slowly returning to normal and I should be ready to go come morning.

I have 3 more treatments to go. Hopefully at the end of all that I won't have to worry about any more, but thanks to the wonders of diabetes I have to have my peepers checked every stinking year. It could be worse, I suppose...it could have killed me when my foot went bad. One thing I don't want to do is to misrepresent myself as being something I am not because I survived an infection that too one of my limbs. I am nothing special in that regard. I just feel very lucky for the good fortune I have had since that time, and anything I have to endure inbetween time is gravy compared to all that.

Up to, and including this medical adventure I have been on to this point.

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