The joys of modern medicine
I did come out of nowhere for most folks following me on Facebook with a couple of offhand references to eye surgery today. So, a bit more detail may be in order as it occurs to me I hadn't been discussing it widely.
A year or so ago, I got my eyes checked, and my left eye was showing a messy astigmatism that seemed to be advancing a lot more aggressively than in the right, so the eye doctor referred me to a cornea specialist. It appears that I have anterior basement membrane corneal dystrophy, sometimes known as map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy or Cogan's dystrophy. Freely translated, the outermost layer of the cornea tissue starts acting more like baklava crust than plywood veneer. In more pronounced cases (like my left eye) that flaky, phyllo-like goodness leads to it getting scuffed up, creating a subtle fingerprint-like pattern of differing thicknesses that distorts focus.
We addressed this with phototherapeutic keratectomy, or laser surgery where that top layer gets removed, leaving a nice, smooth surface for it to then regrow correctly. This was an outpatient procedure involving valium and the sorts of numbing eye-drops that get used in exams, and I now have a hard contact lens in that eye as a bandage that (if all goes well) will come out on Monday and a golf bag of eye drops (an antibiotic, an anti-inflammatory, a painkiller, and artificial tears) to use several times a day for a while.
Between the resurfacing and the contact, it feels like I have something in my eye (go figure). I was tearing up like mad as the local wore off, but spent the afternoon resting it and have pretty much acclimated after the first couple hours, which was about what I expected.
A year or so ago, I got my eyes checked, and my left eye was showing a messy astigmatism that seemed to be advancing a lot more aggressively than in the right, so the eye doctor referred me to a cornea specialist. It appears that I have anterior basement membrane corneal dystrophy, sometimes known as map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy or Cogan's dystrophy. Freely translated, the outermost layer of the cornea tissue starts acting more like baklava crust than plywood veneer. In more pronounced cases (like my left eye) that flaky, phyllo-like goodness leads to it getting scuffed up, creating a subtle fingerprint-like pattern of differing thicknesses that distorts focus.
We addressed this with phototherapeutic keratectomy, or laser surgery where that top layer gets removed, leaving a nice, smooth surface for it to then regrow correctly. This was an outpatient procedure involving valium and the sorts of numbing eye-drops that get used in exams, and I now have a hard contact lens in that eye as a bandage that (if all goes well) will come out on Monday and a golf bag of eye drops (an antibiotic, an anti-inflammatory, a painkiller, and artificial tears) to use several times a day for a while.
Between the resurfacing and the contact, it feels like I have something in my eye (go figure). I was tearing up like mad as the local wore off, but spent the afternoon resting it and have pretty much acclimated after the first couple hours, which was about what I expected.