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One of the common side effects of the gas bubble used to hold the retina in place after vitrectomy and retina repair is damage to the lens. The surgeon said it was due to the lens not getting enough nutrients as the gas expanded and touched it. I’ve also read that the gas itself may damage the lens. Either way, my lens had some damage and was not as clear as it should be and was getting worse, so I needed cataract surgery in that eye.
The surgery went very well, and was quick and effective. The picture below shows me right after the surgery.
In the surgery, the doctor broke up and sucked out my old lens and inserted a new corrective artificial lens in the eye. Recovery has been good so far. I had to wear the shield until the follow-up appointment the next day as well as every night for a week or so. I’m on three expensive drops to fight inflammation and the possibility of infection. I’m back at work and no problems have appeared.
Because of the corrective lens in the eye, I can, to some extent, see well out of that eye. It isn’t corrected completely, and due to the retina problems and macular hole, I will not be able to get the fine detail vision back most likely, but overall, I can see surprisingly well with that eye. The lens in my glasses was totally inappropriate for the eye now, so I took it out and can see okay without it. Because glasses lenses make everything a little smaller, without that lens, everything looks a little larger (well, normal, but the other eye still has the glasses lens to make things look smaller).
So hopefully this will end the saga of my eye. I will make another post sometime with some hints and ideas for others having to deal with retina detachment and its aftermath.
While sleeping was tough after the vitrectomy surgery, the days weren’t too bad. Somehow, the days flew by and merged into each other so I almost lost track of time. I can’t exactly explain it, but perhaps it was because everything took so much longer that doing just a few things took up the whole day. Also, the regimen of 12 applications of eye drops or ointment to my eye took quite a bit of time and effort each day.
Eating was slow, and I had to eat things that weren’t fiddly and could easily be stuffed into my mouth as I faced straight down. Foods like taquitos and sausages worked well, for example. Drinking was also a pain, because I needed to use a straw for everything. Drinking coffee through a straw is unusual, but I learned to get used to it. I had a fair number of Boost drinks in the first few days, as they were very easy for breakfast, and some of them taste darn good!
During the days, I needed a cot to lay on as I tried to keep myself amused. Before the surgery, I bought a cot from Amazon that has a face hole and pillow and is 18 inches off the floor. It is the Ergo Lounger OH Therapeutic Face Down Lounger (link valid as of the date of this article). Of course, this cot was comfortable for an hour, then became torture, so we had to fix it. First we added a couple of yoga mats for extra padding and support, followed by a padded mattress cover and a sheet to make it soft and smooth. That still wasn’t enough for the metal supports that quickly dug into me, so we slit some pool noodles lengthwise and wrapped them around the metal frame under me. In the end, it was comfortable enough for me to spend the better part of nearly 7 weeks on, as of this writing (yes, I was told 2 weeks, but the bubble is still in my eye, so I’m still mostly face down – more in a future post).
The pictures above are of me resting on the cot. You can see various U-shaped face pillows in the top image, because different ones are needed for different tasks. For example, only one of the pillows was flexible enough to be useful when I was wearing my glasses. Yes, really, all these things that are designed for people to put their faces into aren’t meant for those of us that wear glasses. You can also see the handy tissue box nearby. That’s critical, because when you’re face down, surprising amounts of stuff come out of your nose and mouth, particularly during naps!
To keep myself occupied, I could use my iPad or laptop. Luckily, my HP laptop screen opens up fully flat, unlike my MacBook Pro. This is important, as you need it to be flat and in front of your face to be useful. When the screen was in front of my face, the keyboard was hard to use, so anything involving lots of typing or even games that use the keyboard were problematic. That being said, I did manage to get a bit of work done after the first week. I could modify and develop code on the laptop and sent it to the lab for testing. I also bought a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad, but it turned out to be less than useful for the same reason. For some reason, I had a very hard time focusing on fine details using my good eye for the first week after surgery. I was unable to read for long, so mostly watched TV, as described below. After a week, though, I read lots on my iPad and Kindle Fire.
I also had a Dell 22″ monitor that I could slide in front of my face. It was hooked up to my entertainment system, so I could watch TV shows from the DVR or play games on the PS3 and XBox360. Here I am trying Burnout Paradise early on, when I was trying to figure out how well my “good” eye could focus. I would say that the 22″ monitor was a little larger than I should have had to keep my eye still. I think perhaps an 18″ one would have been better.
With this face-down entertainment center, I was able to keep myself from being bored, read a bunch of e-books, catch up on TV shows that have been on the DVR since February, and finish Halo 4. So daytime was a lot better, more comfortable, and productive than nighttime.
We went to London for a reunion with Karen’s family at the end of June for a week. We stayed in the fantastic London Marriott Hotel County Hall that is on the Thames between Westminster Bridge and the London Eye. The hotel building used to be the county government building. It was very central, with just a short walk across the bridge to Big Ben and the Westminster tube stop, and a walk in the other direction to Waterloo station.
The day after we arrived, we went to the London Fire Brigade Museum for some research Karen was doing, then to the Shard, the tallest building in Europe, to see the sights from the observation deck. It rained that night and the next morning, but we had perfect weather the rest of the trip.
After my vitrectomy surgery I had to remain face down 24 hours a day. The only exception was the 12 times a day when my wife was putting drops or ointment into my eye. Therefore, I had to come up with equipment and settings to help me sleep at night and survive in a prone position during the day. This post is about the night situation, so I will cover the daytime setup later.
The surgeon’s staff gave me a brochure for a company that would rent vitrecomy recovery gear by the week, but I decided to try to solve the problem myself, because I am so tall that I guessed none of the rental stuff would work for me. For example, their sleeping arrangement consisted of a large wedge pillow that raises your body off the bed (so far, so good) and a U-shaped pillow mount that holds your head flat. The problems for me were: a) your head is facing down over, but not too far from, the bed, thus I think it could get hot and stuffy in that little pocket; and b) if I set it up that way, my feet would be way off the end of the bed, which would be quite uncomfortable.
I ended up finding an Earthlite Home Massage Kit on Amazon.com (link valid as of 8/16/2013) that is an extremely flexible U-shaped pillow mounting system. I mounted it between my mattress and box spring at the foot of the bed and ended up sleeping the opposite way from usual (so I didn’t have to mess with the headboard). The result is shown below.
That first night after the surgery was pretty bad. I had a terrible time sleeping on my face, so I got up and rearranged the Earthlite kit to it would support me over the kitchen table, so I slept there for a while. The picture makes it look like the pillow wasn’t quite flat, but I think I managed to adjust it so my face was parallel to the table.
I dreaded going to bed, because the surgeon instructed me to keep wearing a plastic shield at night. This particular torture device was fitted to me after surgery to protect the eye from me clawing at it. Because it fits on the face, it digs into the face when said face is pressed into a U-shaped pillow for sleeping. My wife tried various things, including putting tape and eventually gauze under the spots it was digging into.
The Earthlite Home Massage Kit is very adjustable, which important for face-down sleeping. If the head is too low, all the blood rushes there and I had lots of swelling around the eye. So I used a couple of pillows to raise my torso above the level of my legs and feet. I also put a pillow under my ankles to help keep my feet comfortable. It is important to raise the U-shaped face pillow enough that the weight of the head is distributed among the forehead and cheeks (too low, and all the weight is on your forehead). If the pillow is too high, however, you’ll be supporting some of your body weight with your face, which is also a bad idea.
No matter how comfortable the pillow seems, it will feel like cement on your forehead after a couple hours, though it will probably be really sweaty, too. This makes sleeping tough. I ended up buying two memory foam replacement pillows for the Earthlite unit as well as a couple of extra covers for them (so some can be washed while the pillows are still in use). I highly recommend getting the memory foam pillows, even though they cost as much as the original unit itself. The original pillow is good, but not good enough for sleeping all night.
My surgeon has given me permission to not wear the shield about 4 weeks after surgery, so that has significantly improved my sleep. I no longer dread going to bed.
I recently had surgery to fix a detached retina and, as of this writing, I am still recovering from it. This is the first of several posts where I will discuss the surgery and, primarily, the recovery. The recovery is quite an ordeal, but at the moment, it seems to be going well, and the retina seems to be in place.
I’ve had a tear in my retina for years, but it somehow stopped itself with a ring of scar tissue. It went unchanged for years, but apparently decided to give way recently. I didn’t have the flashing or the gray curtain that so many people report when their retinas detach. Instead, things looked a little funny in my center vision, with straight lines not being exactly straight. It also seemed that things weren’t exactly where they should have been, which, I presume, was a sign that the whole retina had detached and the focal point was in the wrong spot. The other telling feature was a something that looked like a bubble on the lower right side of my vision. My ophthalmologist took a picture of the retina, and that area looked like curtains, so it had really lost its shape. It was still sensitive to light, so the retina was still alive and could possibly be repaired. My wife and I were hustled over to a retina specialist to get him to take a look and schedule surgery. Since things don’t just go bad a little, it turned out I also had a tear in the macula, which is the focus of detailed vision, so it was a challenging case.
The surgery apparently involved micro-scale instruments being inserted into the eye so the surgeon can place the retina and then use lasers (in my case) to tack it down. It is called a vitrectomy, because the vitreous jelly that fills the eye is removed. In my case, a gas bubble was then put in to keep the retina in place during the healing process. The gas bubble floats, and the retina is at the back of the eye, so, if you are good at mentally visualizing that situation, you can guess why the recovery period is so unpleasant. I have to remain face down all the time, except when I’m getting drops put into the eye. All the time! I was initially told 2 weeks, but when the 2 weeks were nearly up, I was given 2 more weeks. I’m not done with those two weeks as of this writing, but I expect more face down time. Future posts will cover the setup I used to make my recovery as comfortable as possible.
Initially, I was supposed to be partly awake for the surgery, which sounded kinda cool, but also horrifying. It turned out that I started snoring in the twilight sleep they put me in, so the anesthesiologist decided to put me all the way under so my snoring didn’t vibrate my head and mess up the surgeon. The surgery apparently went well, though my vision will be messed up for quite a while, so I won’t know the final outcome for a while. The surgeon did close the macular hole and the bubble is holding it in place, so fingers are crossed for a good outcome.
Now that I’ve had a bit more time to use the Surface Pro, my view of it hasn’t changed. It is nice hardware with imperfect software that has potential to get better. I have had some other thoughts, however.
I believe Windows 8 is a turning point for Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming more and more like Google and Facebook in that their product is not software and operating systems – their product is us. We are not the consumers anymore, but the product. Data about us is what Microsoft is gathering with Windows 8. I can’t quite say who the customers are or how Microsoft will profit from it, but it is pretty clear that we are being aggregated, profiled, and explored more than ever before by Microsoft products. And I don’t think our best user experience is the main goal.
To begin with, the account you use to sign into Windows 8 is a Microsoft web account (a Live account or similar). Since I created a new one to be able to buy the Surface from the Microsoft Store, I chose to use that one. I have another couple of Microsoft accounts, including one I use at work, but since this was a personal purchase, I didn’t want to use it. I’ll discuss issues with the other one later.
So, we log into the machine with our web-based username and password. Microsoft now synchronizes all our account info to the web so that data can follow us from machine to machine. I don’t have another Windows 8 machine, so I don’t know what is synchronized and what isn’t, but I can imagine IE bookmarks, for example. I assume that none of us mind Microsoft being able to store and read our bookmarks, right?
Even more interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be an official Facebook App for Windows 8. Yes, there are lots of 3rd party ones, but I trust them much less than I trust Microsoft. So what is the solution? There is a People App that will show your Facebook friends’ updates. Good, right? No. You can’t just login to Facebook from the App, but you need to associate your Microsoft web ID with your Facebook profile, essentially giving Microsoft access to your Facebook. That’s a showstopper right there, so I haven’t done it and don’t plan to, no matter how great the People App promises to be.
And then there’s the Games App. It will be happy to link up with my Xbox Live account, except my Xbox Live ID is not the same as the Microsoft ID that I used to login to Windows 8. Any way around it? Nope, I’d have to create a separate Windows 8 user for my Xbox Live account, thus fragmenting my identity on the Surface.
So Microsoft really wants to aggregate all our information in one place, under our Microsoft ID. They want our Facebook info, our Xbox info, and who knows what else. And the system won’t work without that info, so it is required to get the best experience from Windows 8. I think I’m just going to treat the Surface Pro as a fancy touch-enabled Windows 7 machine and avoid getting sucked into the Microsoft privacy-reducing ecosystem.
Because the Microsoft Surface Pro was on sale, I bought one, somewhat for reasons I will explain in a future post, but also because I am a gadget nut and wanted a tablet designed for Windows 8.
My impressions so far are that the Surface Pro is a very solid, speedy machine. The “Type Cover” with the real keyboard is essential and makes typing far superior to an iPad, even an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard (I recently bought the AmazonBasics one and it works quite well with my iPad). The screen is great, and the pen is a nice addition that I’ve missed from the TabletPC days.
Sadly, there are lots of “almosts” too. The power connector is so similar to Apple’s magnetic power connector that I’m surprised Apple’s lawyers aren’t sharpening their knives, but it isn’t nearly as good. The Apple connector is foolproof and seats itself properly with ease. This one takes lots of fiddling to get it to engage, then usually isn’t quite in the slot, so a little sliding is needed. And that power supply brick is about twice the volume of my MacBook Pro’s one.
The Windows 8 interface is quite good, but some of the apps tend to get confused, particularly Internet Explorer. IE tries to touch-enable websites, particularly MSN, but I was trying to show my wife a story with a slideshow and the browser just stopped responding. I had to kill it (drag a finger from the top of the screen until the app detaches, then drag it to the bottom). IE also can’t seem to load my very generic WordPress website well. It stalls after loading the top of the page. If I hit the stop button, then usually the rest of the page draws and I can continue managing of viewing the site. (As a followup, a little debugging led me to discover that Amazon’s Send to Kindle widget was causing trouble for IE. I’ve disabled it for now.)
Other included apps are often quite finicky about touches of their supposedly touch-enabled buttons. These are minor complaints, but both Android and iOS have better behavior and consistency.
Windows 8 was able to find my printers and configure them without a huge fuss. The Surface Pro works well with my 5GHz WiFi network, which is more than I can say for my Nexus 4 (keeps forgetting to use the 5GHz radio) or my HP laptop which doesn’t even have a 5GHz radio, though it is only 2 years old.
Overall, the Surface Pro is pretty nice, and it should keep improving as Windows 8 is updated. I’m not quite sure I’ll be developing much code on the Surface Pro, but I like having the option to carry an Eclipse development environment around with me.
In addition to the Endeavour, we saw some other spacecraft at the California Science Museum. Exciting to have all this space history in one place so close to us!
The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in a temporary facility when we went to see it in January at the California Science Museum near USC, just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was exciting to see it, and, though it was crowded, we didn’t have to waste too much time getting in to see it. We had tickets with reservation times, but there are lots of exhibits to look at while the crowd moves through to the the shuttle. Those were somewhat interesting, though some of them were very tailored to kids.
Rather than lots of description here, I’ve put short captions of the pictures below, so click through and take a look.
Used shuttle tires! Part of the exhibit on the way to the main attraction.
Note the spelling of “Endeavour.” And the control jets.
Near the entrance to the hall, we stopped to pose in front of the Endeavour.
The photo of my wife is better lit than the one of me, because of the ability of the respective photographers.
One of the tiles looks broken, and many look a bit worn.
The view along the shuttle’s side.
The tiles are all individually numbered, and some have to be oddly shaped.
The bay door hinges are visible on the side of the shuttle.
A close up view of the skin above the thermal tiles near the start of the wing. Short people would have trouble taking that picture.
I like how they painted the flag in the direction it would go if it were “flying” while the shuttle moves.
It’s pretty amazing to walk under the Endeavour! It is mounted tall enough that even I could walk under it. I could have reached up and touched it, but didn’t because I didn’t want to be thrown out.
Tiles on the underside.
There doesn’t look like enough room for the landing gear can fit in there
That looks like an access port for servicing, perhaps.
A closer view of what I think must be a service access area.
The main engines and the very tall tail.
I don’t know if that’s a hinge on the tail below the main engines, but it sure looks like it could be articulated.
The nose without any annoying people in front of it.
It’s hard to get the whole thing in the frame without a wide angle lens and in the small space. This is the best I could do.
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The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in a temporary facility when we went to see it in January at the California Science Museum near USC, just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was exciting to see it, and, though it was crowded, we didn’t have to waste too much time getting in to see it. We had tickets with reservation times, but there are lots of exhibits to look at while the crowd moves through to the the shuttle. Those were somewhat interesting, though some of them were very tailored to kids.
