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Today is the day of the big eclipse that people in the US are going nuts about. Here's hoping people listen to the warnings and don't look directly at the sun. I'm going to be a bit more conservative, though. I think I'll stay inside and watch it on the internet. Why?
I found out recently that I need eye surgery. We thought the condition would progress much slower allowing me to avoid surgery for several more years. No such luck. I don't need to complicate things by burning the crap out of my retinas by looking at the sun today. Nope. I'll pass.
Salzmann’s Nodular Degeneration. It’s a rare eye condition that causes bluish-gray lesions to grow on the surface of the eye. They hurt. So freaking much. I didn’t notice them much at first, but over the last few years the discomfort has progressed quite a bit. I’ve given up wearing eye makeup. I have pretty much lost all sense of vanity at this point. You know that feeling you have when you get an eyelash or speck of dirt in your eye? ALL. THE. TIME. My eyelids feel like sandpaper. My dry eye condition isn’t helping either. One doesn’t seem to cause the other, but they are often found together. It also is possible that the dry eye can aggravate the Salzmann’s.
All I know is that I am in pain. I don’t think I realized how much pain until the doctor brought up surgery, and I barely flinched. I wasn’t freaked out about the idea of surgery. I was more curious as to why all the sudden when we thought I had many years.
Turns out one of the lesions on the left eye is beginning to encroach my vision so it is time. I’ve embraced the idea. What I find odd is that the right eye is the one that hurts the most. I decided that day that both eyes are getting done. Both eye surgeries are scheduled. They won’t do both at the same time. I guess they want to make sure the one eye heals well before they start tinkering with the other. I can respect that.
I’m told the surgery itself will take just a few minutes, like maybe 10. Basically, they will peel the lesions off my eyeball. That sounds freakish, right? The good news is that the eye will be numb and temporarily blind so I won’t see it coming. That’s all I care about at this point. I don't want to see it coming.
What am I doing to prepare? The surgeries were only just scheduled last week so I haven’t had much time. I did go ahead and arrange resources at work to assist while I am recuperating.
What I am considering are ways to manage my anxiety leading up to the surgery and how I can support myself nutritionally both pre-operatively and post-operatively. The surgeries are almost two weeks apart, and each eye takes about two weeks to heal. I’m looking at a month of recovery time in total. My first surgery is in less than two weeks so not much time.
This past weekend I defrosted the big freezer in the basement and reorganized it. I needed to take stock of what I have and what I might need. I made three batches of bone broth in my Instant Pot. I now have six quarts of chicken broth and three quarts of beef broth in my freezer along with some in my fridge. I plan to start sipping a little broth every day to boost my immune system and vitamin and mineral stores. I read somewhere that gelatin and collagen are important for tissue repair and formation.
If I can get to it, I hope to do a post on nutrition and surgery that I’ve been researching. My priority, though, will be stocking my freezer with packets of precooked protein so I don't have to cook if I don't feel like it, and getting a few chores done around the house so I can put my feet up and relax the first few days after surgery.
