BLAST FROM THE PAST: You might catch me staring ...

 From The News & Reporter, Dec. 24, 2008 

My left eye is going to be bloodshot on St. Patrick's Day.

I'm 100 percent Irish, but it won't be for obvious reasons. I'll be having eye surgery on March 16. I will have a cornea transplant and that's the soonest they can schedule it.

I've had a condition in both my eyes since I was probably 14 called keratoconus.

"Kerato" is a Latin for wart. The conous is the "cone" of my eye, the cornea.

The eye has several parts important to vision. Unbeknownst to me for the longest time, the part you would think does most of the focusing, the lens, inside the eye, actually does about 20 percent of the focusing.

I don't have a wart like one might get on his thumb, but there is a distortion of the tissue that covers the eye. You can't see it to look at it, because the tissue is very thin, and the tissue is also transparent.

But the tissue that bends the light to where it hits the lens is distorted. 

I've had it since I was in high school. We've tried a bunch of things. Contact lenses were once thought to help. I once had to wear a soft contact lens on one eye, over which they placed a hard contact. That was back when I was in college. It was annoying, and actually irritating.

Just recently, they suggested we try a new type of contact lens. It had a soft edge with a "semi-hard" center.

The contact lens in both instances was to take the place of my damaged cornea.

The piggyback didn't work too well that semester in college. The new-type lens didn't work at all most recently.

In my college years, at two separate times, I had surgery then. Long name for the procedure, but it was a graft. They put a little bit of someone else's cornea on top of mine. It was intended to stabilize my vision. It did well enough. I still needed glasses to see good, but my eye worked well enough.

I continued to see the doctor who did my surgery up until a few years ago. He doesn't do this anymore, I understand. He passed me off to another doctor in his practice. It's actually a family operation, and I have a lot of trust for what was done. I had two procedures done on my eyes then. You see, you only do one at a time.

Anyway, my former doctor said that he was amazed how long the grafts had held up, but they were beginning to go.

The vision in my left eye is atrocious, and the plan, right now, is to do that eye. But my right eye is actually a bit more fragile, despite giving me substantially better vision. And I wonder if I'm making the right choice.

I'm not much of a daredevil, but I'd almost like to do them both at once.

I'm amazed at how the technology has come in certain respects. For other problems of the eyey, cataracts, etc., they can use a laser to reshape the eye. But not this.

I don't hear much about the graft being done, though I've fallen off the National Keratoconus Foundation's mailing list since it merged with another eye disease group.

But this procedure that was done at a hospital when i was 19 will now be done on an outpatient basis at my doctor's office.

There will be pain. But I remember what happened the last time. I had it done over the summer, so it didn't interfere with college courses, not that much. The vision problem did interfere with it.

I've had my prescription changed about four times in the past year, and we didn't get one the last time I went in. Thought it could perhaps survive.

I'm sure it's hard to do any job if you can't read. But reading is about 90 percent of my job. There's this solid waste plan for Chester County that I've been dying to delve into, sitting on my desk.

My right eye is fragile, I think, because it's been carrying the load for so long. So after the shock to my left from the surgery subsides, it will take some time for the vision to settle in to what it will be. I'll have stitches in my eye for almost a year, though some will come out sooner, and some will "pop" too early and cause something between an itch and pain like a molecular sized needle stock in your eye.

When they told me what day I was going to have surgery, I had the opening line of my column right away. 

I thought it was funny, and it had the added benefit of outraging one of my sisters and my mother.

"How can you make a joke about this?" they wanted to know.

It's the easiest thing in the world to make fun of it. If you can't, then it owns you.

It's an established procedure. I think this doctor is about my age. I might be a little weirded out if he were younger, but that will have to happen someday, right?

And while there's some humor to be made at the situation, and it will certainly get funnier as the day approaches and they ask you all those silly questions, we have to take it seriously.

I've never really had good vision in my life, but if something does go wrong, what I have today might be the best vision I'll ever remember as an adult. There's a lot to lock in. My gorgeous bride, my smiling, blue-eyed son are foremost among the things I will have to memorize.

So you might catch me staring.

PS: I wrote the following short, short column a few days before my 2009 surgery, right before I took what was supposed to be a week off and turned into a month off.

’tis no time for Irish jokes, me ma says

Originally published in The News & Reporter, March 11, 2009 

I’ve written about my eye problems before and written about my upcoming surgery in a column when it was scheduled. I joked about it, because of the timing.

I’ll be having it Monday, March 16. St. Patrick’s Day “Eve,” so I wrote I’d have a bloodshot left eye on St. Patrick’s Day, but not for obvious reasons. That made my mother and sisters a bit angry.

Normally around St. Patrick’s Day, I try to regale my readers with Irish jokes or tell them at length about Irish music and songs and writing.

But we are a pretty busy bunch of folk here at The News & Reporter these days. So I have to appease my sisters and mother and we have to do “important” work.

A good newspaper does have a sense of humor, but times are tight on space these days.

The N&R will be closed on Monday. Please get your items to our staff for next Wednesday’s paper as early as you can. I’ll be out for a week. If you need to get a news story in, please call Travis Jenkins or Nancy Parsons Tuesday through Friday.

Thanks for your well wishes. and I promise to treat my new cornea better than the old. No more using it to hammer nails into the wall.

Sorry. Forgive. Please allow me a little bit of humor in my last column before I go under the knife.