For a realtime check of my eye progress go here
I am trying to get everything down because I am sure they will want to know everything about it. It caused everyone a lot of grief to say the least. So far no one I've talked to has remembered anything like this happening in medicine
The incident yesterday was beyond anything I could imagine. It was beyond imagination because I was in a situation so bad that I would have accepted death to end it. I thought about it. I would have done anything to stop the torture but I was helpless to do anything because I was sedated. I didn't want death but to get out of my torture I was in a state of mind to accept it if that is what it took. I thought I might be dying. I thought "is this how it is to die? I didn't know where I was or what was going on so I didn't know if I was ever to escape. I knew where I was supposed to be but what was going around me didn't match that place. So how do I to get out of it except to die?" Not knowing was the problem. If it was a temporary situation then you could try to bear it. But I didn't know what was causing it and it didn't show any signs of letting up. It just kept going on and on. Noises of all kinds like I had never heard before.
I could not understand anything that I was hearing. It was so loud that it seemed as if my ears were turned up to maximum. Or I was in a room with the stereo volume turned up but the sounds were not recognizable. There was all kinds of noises, I cant describe what they were. I'd never heard them before, It seemed to go on and on. Just wouldn't stop. I couldn't do anything to get out or stop it.
When you are under anesthetic you know how helpless you are. I wondered if this was how it was to die. Not what I had read about. But no one has come back from the dead except our Christ to tell us. Eventually after what seemed like an eternity the sounds and lights began to ease up and I began to recognize the doctors voice and understand what she was saying to the nurses in the room. I could also feel her doing her stitching as she sewed up my eye. I had not told her that the some Gudgel's, I included, had a genetic defect in their left eye that causes it to droop a little and I think that this might have had something to do with her inability to properly adjust the closure of the lid. I will tell her just as soon as practicable so she can consider it. I wasn't too concerned though about the closure because I don't see out of it anyway.
I had gone in to a surgery center to get my eyelids lifted. I have only one eye and it isn't much good because the eyelid covered part of the pupil. Actually I had had an eyelid lift 30 or 40 years ago with such minor disruption I could not remember the details except the Dr. looking down into my face as he did his work. And remembering that I had had a lift sometime in the past. It was not until I saw a picture of my face today with the puffy eyelids that my memory came flooding back.
When the doctor was finally finished she started the ending procedure of showing her fingers and moving her hand around to check the results of her work. Then she started doing more of it and asked me something about how many fingers she was holding out. Then I told her I couldn't see her hand. It seemed real dark in the room I asked about this time if my eyes were open. It looked like my eyes were closed and I was in a dark room. I had no feeling in my eyes so I couldn't tell if they were open or closed. They told me they were open so I then knew I was blind. But until they told me they were open I didn't know
Then of course it was apparent that I was blind and things began to get a little hectic, The doctor checked out my eyes and they passed the tests. It had to be something else. Then they began to think of stroke. When the doctor could not find anything wrong in my eyes she made immediate arrangements to go to Emergency and get the usual head procedures of MRI and CAT scans. You don't just get an MRI scan without going through the Emergency Entrance. Not me of course I was going with the doctors orders to go direct to the machines. But I still had to go through the registering procedure and that meant Tom had to be there. During this process of being blind I began to think. "So this is what it like to be blind? What do we do now?" I didn't panic but thought so I am blind and it comes sooner than I expected. During my blind stage I could see a faint outline of the fluorescent light fixture above my head. A good description would be looking through a very dense black and white negative when they used negatives in photography. The color was about the same too. Not the black of a printer. So within a very short time they had me under the CAT scanner. Immediately after the CAT scan they took me to the MRI torture chamber. By the time we went into the MRI machine I could see some outlines of objects in the room. Very faint but still visible. The big well lit objects especially. None of the small objects. There may have been no small ones anyway. As it is black in an MRI machine I don't know when my sight returned. When I got out I could see quite well except for the fuzziness from ointments put on them by the doctor. My hearing was normals too. But it had been normal since coming out of the horror procedure I had been in
So that is where it stands now. My eyes are responding as expected. You can see a picture of them by going to temporaryposts.blogspot.com/2011/05/eyes.html
I don't know why but when my eyes are clear of tears they work better than before the operation. With the swelling the lids still droop about as much as before but I can read the print on the computer screen better than before. I always had to use reading glasses and sit up close even with large print because they would be fuzzy. But now I can read the print 3 feet away, That's good.
Yesterday Kay was with us all day long. Today she keeps asking me what about my eyes. She has totally forgotten.
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Bill Sheldon June 17, 1920. April 4, 2001. Four years in the 3rd Infantry Division WW2 His story. Find it at Four years in the 3rd Inf in WW2
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