My Pirate

July 31, 2009

Robert asked me this morning, “what is it like, sleeping with a pirate?”! He has been a very good pirate too. I marvel at how patient and cooperative he has been with the whole eye surgery thing. I would be doing a heap of whining and complaining. In fact, I can hardly look at the eye, being all black and blue, red and swollen. He has three different eye drops to put in, some of them 4 times a day, and some twice. We have a chart to keep track and alarms set on his phone to remind him. I’m such a wimp, I can’t even do it for him. He can pull back the lower lid and drop it in without having to look at the bruises. The most challenging thing is the gas bubble inside his eye…he says he feels like a human “level”. Because that is what it is doing – always seeking to be level, and he can see it constantly, even when his eyes are shut. A glowing, bluish, purplish bubble, floating and turning and rocking back and forth inside his eye. He said yesterday he was going to take a nap, because sleeping is the only relief from the “level”. It is supposed to go away, but we don’t know the timetable for that. Meanwhile, he only has very blurry vision with his eye so far. How he endures it, I don’t know. But then, we are talking about a man who also was not completely ‘asleep’ for the surgery itself. In recovery, after they called me back to sit with him, he asked the Dr, “was I actually seeing the tweezers inside my eye, pulling the membrane out, because it looked like that was what I was seeing”. Oh my. And the Dr. said, “well, it was actually the shadow of the tweezers you could see.” Yikes. I don’t know how he did it…in fact, he said he had conversation throughout most of the surgery. Can you imagine, chatting with instruments inside your eyeball? Yep, he makes a good pirate!

~Jeanette
P.S. thankfully it was 58 degrees this morning and our high inside the house yesterday was only about 84 :)