Oh my goodness!
What a crazy three days it’s been.
“What’s going on?” I know you wanna know.
Out of the blue, Mike’s had a retinal detachment.
Wednesday, on our shopping trip, Mike says, “My eye’s blurry.”
I didn’t really think anything of it.
I took a few pictures for you.
The sun coming up over the Susquehanna.
The sun was on my left as we head for Tunkhannock and the moon was on my right. This is the barn they’re renovating. Whether it’ll be a house or an event venue, I don’t know.
I watch the trees for tufts of white. That’s how I spot hawks and eagles. The recent snowfall has left tufts of snow on top of squirrel nests and in the y’s of trees and it makes it hard to spot them. I never stopped looking for them, but after a while I stopped expecting the white to be them and didn’t keep my camera at the ready.
“I’ll
probably miss ‘em now,” I told Mike and I did! There was one sitting on a
branch right beside the road. I had the perfect shot out the front windshield
and I missed it!
OY!
The next day, just around lunchtime, he says, “I can’t see out of half of my eye.”
I sat up and took notice then. “What do you mean you can’t see out of half your eye?”
“It’s like a shadow or curtain across half of it.”
I called Mike’s primary doctor first, thinking they had someone they recommended.
“No. Just call up to the Guthrie,” Misty said.
Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre is now, and has been for some time, Guthrie, but I still hear people call it “the Packered.” I called up there and talked to a gal in ophthalmology. She asked a whole bunch of questions, and ended saying, “Someone will get back with you.”
That sounded rather vague. “I’m afraid it could be time sensitive,” I told her. “Do you think I should bring him in?”
“I’ll send this back to triage and they’ll let you know.”
I guess that’s all I was going to get. “Okay. It’ll take us about an hour and half to get there.”
“I’ll add that to the note,” she said.
We waited.
And waited.
At twenty past two we got the call.
“Can you be here at three fifteen?” she said.
“No. It takes at least an hour and fifteen minutes to get there,” Mike answered.
“Okay. I’ll let them know and get back with you.”
About an hour later we get another call. “When can you get here?” Barb asked.
“If we leave now we can be there by a quarter to five.”
“Okay. Do your best to get here by then — but drive safely,” she added.
We got around and went.
“Look at that!” I exclaimed. “The Lord cleared the roads for you!”
We made it to the hospital in about fifty-five minutes.
It was past clinic hours and the waiting room in ophthalmology was empty when we got there, however there was still a receptionist on duty and we checked Mike in. We didn’t wait long before Barb came to get us.
“Are you the one I talked to on the phone?” Mike asked.
“Yes it was.”
“Don’t ask how fast he was driving,” I said.
Mike got in the chair and she did some preliminary testing on him.
“Is the doctor an ophthalmologist?” Mike asked. “Because of my eye history, I always have to see an ophthalmologist.”
“No, Dr. Rydzynski’s an optometrist, but he’s not like a Walmart optometrist. He’s had special training and he’s very good.” Barb said. “And you can’t see an ophthalmologist until you first see the optometrist. It weeds out the unnecessary cases.”
Barb was right. He was very thorough and very good. He didn’t see any of the things he expected to see and sent Mike for pictures. That was how he found that Mike had a shallow retinal detachment.
“Thank you for waiting for us,” I told him. Then I told him about the communication we had with the staff.
“I actually got the message at twelve forty and told them to tell you to come right in,” he admitted. “They have a new system that’s supposed to streamline it.”
That, obviously, wasn’t working very well.
We went home and waited to hear when the surgery would be. They called us at eight o’clock the next morning.
“Can you be here at one?” she asked.
“Yes, we can.”
“Nothing to eat or drink from now on,” she said.
Mike drove. He isn’t crazy about my driving and besides, he won’t let me take pictures when I’m driving! Go figure! I did take some pictures on our way to the hospital.
Our creek is frozen over.
The Susquehanna.
My eye can ignore the trees, my camera cannot.
Going across the Veterans Bridge from Wysox into Towanda.
A house way up on the cliff overlooking the Susquehanna.
The turkeys must cross in this area. I’ve seen “tired” turkeys along here before.
People milling around the hospital’s helicopter. I don’t know if it was coming or going.
Dr. McClintic examined Mike. He didn’t think it had just happened but didn’t say when he thought it did.
“Now, when should you have the surgery? If it were me or someone I loved, I’d tell you to have the surgery tonight,” he said. Then quickly added, “It’ll have to be after I finish my clinics but I don’t mind staying and getting this done.”
Staying after regular office hours led to discussions with both doctors about wives waiting at home. Dr. Rydzynski doesn’t have kids yet but his wife is currently carrying twin girls. Dr. McClintic said his wife is used to it.
“How often do you have to stay for emergency surgery?” Mike asked.
“Usually about once a month I’ll have an emergency surgery, but today I have two. You and another one.”
We went through all the stuff we had to and were told to come back for his surgery at four. “I thought that’s what we were coming in at one for,” I said to Mike. “Especially when she said nothing to eat or drink.”
“Me too.”
They also made us a post-op appointment for early the next morning.
“It’ll be late tonight by the time you’re done and I really don’t like driving after dark. What if we just stayed up here tonight?”
“Good idea,” Mike agreed.
We had nothing with us, no toothbrushes or change of clothes, no meds, or anything else that would’ve made our stay more pleasant. It’s for one night, we could tough it out. We had a few hours before we had to be back to the hospital so we called around and found a mid-priced hotel room. It was pretty nice and even had a kitchenette. The only thing I could see wrong with it is it had Box Elder bugs. There were at least three dead on the windowsill and one crawling up the curtain.
It was after hours again when we got back to the hospital for the surgery and once again people had stayed to take care of us. There were two ladies in the waiting area when we got there and they didn’t try to keep their conversations private.
“We don’t know if we’ll be first or second,” one of the gals was speaking into a phone.
That’s what we were told, too, so I knew then that they were the other emergency.
After a bit she got up to check the status board. I was sitting near it. “What do the colors mean?” she asked.
I’ve been through this before. “There’s a chart here to show you,” I said pointing to a laminated sheet hanging on the wall. “Green means in surgery, yellow is pre-op, white means checked in, and blue is post-op.”
“Oh thank you,” she said.
“We’re the other emergency,” I told her and from there we had a nice conversation. Her mother is ninety and she and her siblings “share” her. “None of us have committed to keeping her fulltime,” she said.
Her mother’s retinal detachment happened about a month ago and she was in Florida. They waited until she came back up here to have her checked with her regular doctor. Of course, they didn’t know she had a retinal detachment, either.
Her mother went into surgery around five and was out an hour later. There was some delay between the two operations and Mike’s operation was a little over an hour.
“I had to hold his hand through the whole thing!” one of the nurses told me. “He was trying to fight us and rub his eyes.”
“They put you to sleep for a few minutes,” Mike told me later, “Then they wake you up and you’re awake for the whole operation. But he told me not to speak during the operation. It was when I was waking up that I was fighting with them. The doctor grabbed my arms and said, ‘Stop! Stop!’” Mike said with a little laugh and shake of his head. “I could see the needle going in and out of my eye but I couldn’t really feel it.”
Mike was told to keep his face down and the back of his head parallel to the ceiling for the first twenty-four hours. That keeps the gas bubble they inserted where it needs to be until the retina settles back into place. There is one small stitch in his eye, too, but it will dissolve.
“Most people can’t sleep on their stomachs so you can sleep on your side,” Dr. McClintic said. “After twenty-four hours, you’re to lay on your side for a week, getting up only to eat and go to the bathroom.” Then he turned to me. “You’ll have to do everything for him,” he said.
“So how’s that any different?” I wanted to know. They laughed thinking I was joking, but I wasn’t. I do spoil Mike and that’s just the way we both like it.
We got back to our hotel around eight o’clock and ordered a pizza. It was the first thing Mike had to eat since seven that morning. All in all, it was a miserable night for us — more so for Mike than for me. He tried sleeping on his side and he’d get up and move to the desk and sleep for a little while with his forehead on the desk. Then he’d move back to the bed for a few hours. They said he could have Tylenol for the pain, but if it got really bad, he was to come back in. Luckily, I was able to buy some in the motel’s little store.
We were up early and watched the news for a little while. With nothing else to do, we left for our appointment.
“You have bugs,” I told the gal when we checked out.
“What?”
“Box Elder bugs. You have bugs.”
“That’s what they’re called?” she asked.
“Yep. It’s winter and they should be sleeping. They don’t hurt anything and they didn’t bother me. A few were dead so it looks like you might’ve sprayed for them.”
“We have four or five rooms that get them. I don’t know why.”
We were super-duper early for our appointment. “It’s either sit here and wait or sit in the hotel and wait,” Mike says, “And I’d rather wait there.” The receptionists weren’t even in their little cubbies yet. That was okay. We sat and waited.
When it was our turn, the doctor looked at Mike’s eye and was pleased.
“Will I get my sight back?” Mike asked.
“It’ll never be what it was. When the retina detaches, the layers of cells get pulled apart. Without oxygen, they start to die fairly quickly — that’s why it’s an emergency. Even if we reattach it fast, some of those cells are already gone and can’t reconnect, so you never get all your vision back. And sometimes the cells don’t line up perfectly again, which can make things look wavy. Come back in a week,” Dr. McClintic said.
Mike has two kinds of drops that have to be put in his eye four times a day, then there’s an ointment I put in his eye before I cover it with a shield to protect it while he sleeps.
Mike walked out of the hospital with his head down, looking at his feet. I drove and he rode that way too. I made it a few miles, as far as Walmart where I was stopping for the drops, when Mike says, “Pull over next to the snow pile. I’m gonna be sick.” I did and he did. “I think it’s a combination of having the pizza so late and riding with my head down,” Mike said.
I left him and went for his meds. He sat and watched all the people coming and going from Walmart’s pick-up service. It kept him highly entertained. “As soon as one person left, another car pulled in. There must be thirty spots and they were mostly full all the time you were gone. He’d go up to the driver’s window and they had to show their receipt on their phone and he’d scan it in. Then some people let him put the groceries in and some got out and checked each and every item.”
“They’re probably the people that got something bad,” I guessed.
We head for home and I pull over at the Crystal Springs Inn right there before you exit down onto route six. A little air helped him and he didn’t get sick that time. That’s when I called the hospital. The lady that fields the calls took the information.
“If I ride with my head up, it’s not so bad,” he said.
Mike asked me to pull over again when we hit Towanda and my phone started to ring at the same time. I managed to answer the phone and get the car parked before he opened the door and got sick again.
Dustin, Dr. McClintic’s assistant, was on the phone. “It’s probably from the car ride. Once you get him home, it should settle down.”
After we got home, Mike vomited again, then started to feel better. He settled in, kneeling in front of his recliner with his forehead on the seat.
I settled at the computer when all of a sudden, “OW!” Mike yelled.
I jumped up and ran in. Mike was getting up and had his hand over his freshly operated on eye. “What’s wrong?”
“Raini jammed her nose in my eye! It hurts!”
She’d gone up to him and was nuzzling him for attention. She didn’t mean to hurt him. We decided, right then and there, that although he’s not required to wear the eye shield except when he sleeps, he might better wear it all the time so that never happens again.
Around noon I peeled him an orange. It wasn’t long until he puked it up.
“Retching causes so much pressure on your eyes, Mike. I’m worried you’re gonna rip something.”
I called the hospital again at one thirty. “We’ve been home since ten and he’s vomited twice more,” I told them.
“Is this Mrs. Luby?” she asked. I’d forgotten to identify myself.
“Yes.”
“Hold on. I’m going to go right back and get someone to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
Fed-Ex came while I was waiting for her. The Fed-Ex man was nice enough to set the huge box with Mike’s Comfort Solutions chair inside on the patio for me. I thanked him and was wrestling the box to the front door when she came back on the line.
“Don’t hang up on me,” she said.
“Okay, I won’t,” I said.
“Mrs. Luby, are you there?”
I stopped fussing with the box and brought the phone closer to my mouth. “I’m here,” I said.
“Mrs. Luby?”
She didn’t hear me, I thought
and immediately looked at my phone. In my efforts to move the box I’d
inadvertently muted the phone. I quickly turned the microphone back on. “I’m
here!” I said, then apologized. “I’m sorry, I’d accidently muted it.”
“That’s okay. Just stay with me.
Everyone’s in with a patient and I’m waiting for them to come out.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
I got the chair in and started to unbox it when she came back. “Mrs. Luby, they want you to bring him in. Can you do that?”
I hate to say it, but I was relieved, even if Mike didn’t want to go. “I can.”
“Do you know when you’ll be here?” she wanted to know.
“If we leave right now, it’ll be an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’m gonna guess it’ll be closer to an hour and a half.”
“So, by about a quarter to three?” she asked.
“Yep.”
I hung up and went about getting ready to go.
“I shouldn’t’ve eaten that orange,” Mike moaned and got sick again!
“Mike, you shouldn’t be getting sick.”
“If I keep my head up, it goes away.”
Not the first time I heard him say that and I hated to tell him to do something against the doctor’s orders, but I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. “Don’t put your head down, then. I think it’s more important that you don’t puke because of all the pressure it puts on your eye.”
Mike was queasy on the ride in, but he kept his head up and managed to not get sick. This time there was no smooth sailing and we were caught in a very, very long line of traffic going twenty-five, thirty miles-an-hour in a fifty-five zone. Even so, we made it a few minutes before I told her we’d be there.
We had a bit of a wait after we checked in.
Dr. McClintic looked in Mike’s eye.
“Everything looks okay. Most of the time, the cause of the vomiting is high pressure in the eye. Your pressure looks okay. But I’m going to prescribe a drop you use twice a day and it’ll keep your pressure low. I’m also prescribing an anti-nausea med for you, too. Sometimes anesthesia is the culprit. It has a small amount of fentanyl in it and some people can be very sensitive to it.”
“It seems worse when I put my head down,” Mike told him.
He thought about it for a minute. “It’s not ideal, and we do like you to keep your head parallel with the floor for the first twenty-four hours, but it’s best for you to not vomit. Keep your head up for the ride home and after that lay on your side. I expect you’ll be over it in twenty-four hours.”
Mike felt better about keeping his head up and didn’t get sick on the short ride to Walmart to pick up the new meds. He waited in the car while I went in. His prescriptions wouldn’t be ready for at least twenty minutes so I went back out and waited in the car with Mike.
My sister had called when we were on the way to the hospital so I returned her call.
“I was just checking to see how Mike’s doing,” she said.
I told her about the latest development.
“Hey, Patti,” Mike interjected.
“What?” Patti replied.
“Guess what they put in anesthesia?”
“What?” she asked.
“Fentanyl!”
Fentanyl has been in the news a lot lately because of all the accidental overdoses and deaths involving it.
“Well, it’s safe when administered by a professional,” Patti told him. “And it’s actually quite commonly used for things like pain.”
My sister is not only beautiful but she’s smart, too! When I feel the need to talk to my mom about something, I turn to Patti now that Momma’s gone.
I get Mike home and get his Comfort Chair set up. There’s a mirror so he can see the TV but everything’s upside down.
After a bit he started to feel sick again, so he spent most of his time sitting sideways in his recliner.
“Bondi knows somethin’s going on,” Mike said. “She keeps trying to smell my eye.”
Dogs know.
Speaking of the dogs...
They really missed us when we left Thursday and didn’t come home until Friday morning. They hadn’t touched their food the whole time we were gone so they were really hungry, too. But once the excitement of having us home wore off, Mike didn’t need to wear his eye protector anymore.
And I think that brings you up to date. We go back for his one-week next Friday.
Sometimes, when I paint things, they’re a surprise so I can’t tell you about them until the recipient gets it. Even though I showed you many of the Valentines I painted, I couldn’t show you the one I painted for that very special friend of mine. My beautiful West Virginia friend, Trish.
“Peg!” you exclaim. “I thought I was your very special friend!”
You are! You are all special to me. And just because I call her special, it doesn’t take anything away from your specialness.
Trish has an affinity for flamingos. I found that out when she came to visit three years ago. I painted her a porch sign and since then, when a holiday rolls around, I try to paint her a card using Fanny Flamingo.
I can show you now because Trish got it this week.
“I love her shoes,” she said.
And I made her a poem to go with it.
Stay sassy, let your spirit glow, dance through life with that flamingo flow. Lift your head and hold your grace, bring your magic to every place. May love and laughter both align, all part of my wish this Valentine.
Speaking of Trish...
I painted my very first caricature and I painted it of her! I was going to surprise her with it, but I couldn’t wait to show her.
“I love it!” she said.
I also posted it on my watercolor page asking if it needed a background. Most everyone thought it didn’t.
“That’s so great! I laughed out loud! Leave it!” was one of the first comments I got.
“She’s adorable! Would she mind if you shared how old she is? I imagine the stories she could tell!” was another.
I asked Trish if she minded. “I’m a proud fifty-year-old,” she said jokingly. “I do have lots of stories to tell, but most people wouldn't believe eighty percent of it!”
Trish will be seventy-three in March.
“Your friend has what I've always referred to as a ‘happy face,’ one of the few people that as soon as you look at them you know they are a good soul that brings joy to whomever knows them.”
That lady really nailed it! Trish is just that kind of person. And she got that from something I painted!
I have a few more odds and ends I could tell you about, but I think for now, I’ll call this one done and save the rest for seed.
Done!
