Eye surgery and other things…

I’m still here in Tucson, still parked at John’s place and still nursing my eye. My eye surgeon (the VA’s Dr. Thomas) injected a gas into my eye 6 days ago to help push my retina back in place and for much of that time I have had a large black bubble visible in my field of vision. That’s to be expected. I still haven’t found out what the stitches were for, I think I’ll ask on my next visit. Anyway, the bubble is shrinking slowly but steadily and is now a minor bubble that barely disturbs my field of view. BUT…(there’s always a but, isn’t there) everything I can see now around and over the bubble is all cloudy, like how a cataract is described. What I don’t know yet is whether or not the bubble will totally dissolve and my vision slowly return, or do I need new cataract surgery done? Note that the first cataract surgery I had 3 weeks ago installed a plastic replacement lens and it’s of course it’s supposed to be clear. What I don’t know is whether or not the subsequent surgery clouded that one up like the laser surgery did to my natural lens before it.

I’m going to put a time line here so years from now I can refer to it if I need to:

1. Woke up one morning ~Feb. 14, 2022 with evidence that I had a torn retina, ran to the VA hospital ER, they sent me to the VA eye clinic and they scheduled me for eye surgery 2 days later.
2. Feb. 16th, had general anesthesia, woke up with the Dr. telling me it went well. Several days later, noticed that everything was all fuzzy. Learned that that is a well known side effect of having laser retina reattachment. Okay…didn’t know that.
3. Feb. 25th to Mar. 29th had several appointments, mostly checkups. One of them though was another surgery, this time to remove my damaged lens and replace with a nice new plastic one with a prescription that matched the vision in my right eye. Seems as though that’s what people do and it makes sense. Especially to me since my right eye always had better vision.
4. Subsequent exams showed that my darn retina still had a fold in it and so on Apr. 19th had another surgery to add the gas bubble inside my eye to press the retina back down. This was the one where immediately after the surgery my prostate was acting up. Very uncomfortable but that has eased up now around Apr. 25th.
5. My next appointment is on April 29th and I hope to be able to finally leave town shortly after…but I don’t know if they have to do another cataract surgery or if it will clear on it’s own. I’ll find out on the 29th.
6. Edit: Went in for the exam on the 29th and the Dr. did a quick visual with her eye doctor magnifier kit (no machines this time to take pictures of my retina…a good thing) and pronounced things ‘good’. So I asked if the fuzziness in my field of view would go away. ‘Perhaps’ was the answer. That means it’s possible and I suppose likely. So I’ll have awful vision in my left eye, and normal vision in my right. At least for a while longer. Unless I’m lucky, and the retina reattaches to the back of the eyeball just the right way to make my vision halfway normal. AND, she wants me back in two weeks for a follow up exam and then a month after that. I started to whine about that and told her I can do the 2 weeks thing but 6 weeks out? Nah, I gotta head north! She asks where too, I say Walla Walla, she says, Oh, yeah, you can go into the Walla Walla eye clinic for the check up. The Walla Walla clinic called me a couple days ago asking if I wanted to make an appointment (likely due to Dr. Thomas asking for that consult) and I said yes, so I have one on July 14th. YEA! I’m finally ready to head out in 2 weeks and a couple days.
7. Edit: July 14th I went into the VA clinic where they have a couple optomitrists and they notified me that the sutures that were supposed to be 2 of and they were supposed to dissolve? There were 3 of them and they could tell by the color that they were NOT the dissolving kind. Crap. That might be why my eye is so bloodshot and uncomfortable. They don’t have an ophthalmologist but they set up an appointment for a local doctor. Took 4 weeks plus to get in.
8. Went into see the ophthalmologist Aug. 11th and he carefully removed the sutures. I asked and he told me there wouldn’t be any medical reason to use non-dissolving sutures. So the doc down in Tucson screwed up AND all the staff in the operating room didn’t say anything? There were at least 12 people in there. Two of them were ophthalmologist’s.
9. On Aug. 19th, I go in for a follow up. I’ve noticed that the eye is getting better, and that I can see without any fuzziness BUT there’s still all the wobbliness in the field of view. Google says it can take up to 6 months for my vision to return to normal.

So sorry about the medical stuff, I know many could care less about other people’s issues but really, I’m putting it here for myself in case something like this happens again…I’ll be able to quickly give the doctor background info. And since I travel all over the world, I can’t expect to be here in the US if I get another torn retina or similar.

Well, here I am still in Tucson, and for most of the last few weeks with only one working eye, so I haven’t done too much touristy stuff. Mainly just hung around home and once in a while did some shopping or visited a brew pub.

One place I shopped at was D2 Dispensary. Since I’ve been having trouble with my knees, I did a google search and this medical/recreational MJ dispensary popped up so I went and visited. Got two types of THC laced gummies at a fair price. They are yummy but all they seem to do after I grew tolerant of them is help me get to sleep. Don’t seem to help with the knees.

And I have been other places around town and it’s high time I posted some articles about them. Going back to January. First up was a simple hour long driving tour of the west side of Tucson. I headed due west for many miles, turned north for a few, than back east towards Tucson. There are some areas over here that seem remote but the vegetation tends to screen the homes out here…

And out here in the ‘near Tucson boondocks’ I discovered some BLM land where campers can dry camp for free. Nearly due west of where I’m staying. And I have sometimes dry camped so I do tend to notice free dry camps when I pass by.

Some spaces out here are kinda nice. If I had solar I wouldn’t mind staying here a bit! There’s always some RV park nearby that’ll let you dump for $5 to $10 and many times, you will find a nearby free dump site put in by the government. Often with potable water.

So I toured that area a bit and then after some more aimless driving, rounded a curve and I can see Tucson proper off in the distance. I’m several miles north of my home base at this point.

I was on the north side of one of the many large hills in this area so I didn’t get a picture of the high rises in downtown, which would have been south of here, but they’re there. Tucson is really really spread out.

After all that gawking, my throat was dry. Parched even, so I stopped at this nice brew pub. The beer wasn’t worth it. It’s the 1912 Brewery. Don’t bother with this one.

So that’s all I saw on that short tour. Next up, a few days later, I remembered, hey! I drive on Mission Blvd nearly 5 times a week. I wonder if there’s an old Spanish mission? So checked google, and sure enough, there is! It’s the San Xavier del Bac Mission south of Tucson. Most of you already know I’m NOT a fan of religion, especially the brutal Spanish but…I don’t have a problem visiting some of their buildings so, here we go.

The architecture is sort of interesting. I’ve been in better though. I’d give this set up a 5 out of 10.

I did enjoy the desert gardens and some of the quiet spaces.

The above ramadas are stalls put in by the Indians on their reservation land that I believe this mission is built on, not sure if the mission owns the land or just leases it. You can see above that one of the stalls is featuring fry bread but I just wasn’t hungry when I passed by.

Note that Grotto Hill is now a private retreat for someone or some group. The mission is interesting from a historical viewpoint but that’s about all. This mission is larger and younger than the one that was near ‘Mission Gardens’ that we explored last time. And it’s several miles south of the gardens and as Tucson sort of grew north instead of what siting priests thought would happen, it was nearly abandoned for many decades because who wanted to come clear down here to go to church? So it started to fall apart due to lack of dues paying parishioners. Being restored now. It’s not as remote as the pictures might suggest but it is way out here. And the population pressure is creeping closer and closer with mega malls and housing projects. Might be that the land becomes far more valuable as a mall or housing site rather than a crumbling mission soon.

So that’s all for today. Hope you enjoyed the trip. See you next time!