I had surgery the other day for retina detachment. Its been a pretty slow recovery process that I wasn't expecting.
I had retina detachment, and being young, was a candidate for a "scleral buckle". Its basically a band around the eye to squeeze the detached part back to the retina from what I understand. It sucks, as does most surgery. I can sympathize with anyone who is blind, or blind in one eye, as using one eye (the eye that didnt get surgery) is quite tiresome. The first few days it was nearly impossible to open my operated eye without it watering and dripping goopy eye gunk. My depth perception is pretty bad, and I'm not sure when I will be able to drive a car again. The standard recovery time is around 6 weeks. I have read some people recover very quick, and some take a long time. I have pretty bad double vision if I keep both eyes open right now. Hopefully this will go away soon so I can get back to using a computer regularly, and going outside would definitely be nice. With the eye fully dilated for a while, it makes sunlight, and any bright light quite intense. The doctor that did the check up said I should be fine to play some video games and watch TV, as long as I dont over do it.
Has anyone on here ever experienced anything like this, or any kind of eye surgery? I had a check up today and everything is healing nicely, but I have not seen much improvement in vision. The eye is slowly becoming less red, and there isnt nearly as much goopy stuff coming out after a week. I'm told there is not much I can do in terms of helping the eye to heal as its mainly the muscle inside that needs to heal, and this can take a long time. Here's hoping that I can have a successful recovery. I would urge anyone with retina detachment, or anyone who might be worried about it, to go and get it dealt with before having to do a buckle surgery. If you catch it early enough, you can get simple laser surgery that can fix the small detachments. If you let it grow, or have a large detachment, the surgeries can be quite extreme. The other option was a "gas bubble" which would have left me having to be face-down, for something like two weeks. I opted for surgery with no gas bubble. Someone else in the doctors office had the gas bubble for 2 days and for part of it she had to be lying on her right side, looking up at the ceiling, for 23 hours straight. At least I can be glad I was a candidate for surgery, although being my first real surgery, I wasn't prepared for this recovery process.
