11/13-11/20 surgery, magnifiers, apartment

Florence and I went to the emergency ward on Sunday(11/11) morning for the eye surgery. The operation lasted about 4 hours(so they tell me). Both eyes were wrapped in belts under the eye muscles, The belts are tightened to increase the pressure within the eyeball. Hopefully that pressure would push the flap of detached retina against the back of the eyeball. The left eyeball had the worst detachment and so a bubble of gas was injected into the left eyeball. When lying prone(face down) the bubble would rise to the back of the eyeball and hopefully push the flap of detachment agaisnt the eyeball. This was all done under general anesthesia
so I wasn't really there.

The bandages came off Tuesday morning. Although the doctor had warned me, my vision was less than what it was before the surgery. I could see blobs of light but no details, this was depressing. But after 2 days the vision in both eyes improved and I was discharged from the hospital. I still could see the gas bubble in the left eye and the bubble had correctly pushed the retinal flap against the back of the eyeball.

I left the hospital with a boatload of pills, drops and sauve. Puffy eyelida and red eyes. They say that at the Battles of Lexington and Concord the colonials were told to hold their fire until "You see the whites of their eyes." If I had been a soldier for King George, I could have walked right through their lines as the whites of my eyes were gone.

I could not read or use the computer without a lot of magnification. I blewup the icons on my desktop to be the size of a cellphone display. I used the high contrast Desktop settings, I used the onscreen magnifyer, I bought a black lettering on white keys keyboard(that helped a lot). I could stumble my way through email.

I now have an impressive collection of magnifyers:

The best is the handsfree unit:

In the meantime, our apartment is in good shape. We have the same apartment and landlord as last time. We have a good relationship so the landlord has really made some improvements. We are still in the Redlight district but close to Florence's relatives and now the MacKay Hospital. We have new windows, new curtains, a microwave, a new flat screen TV, a new couch and maybe even the same pigeons.