Well, last Tuesday I went back to my surgeon to see how things were doing. My eye pressure was still holding steady in a good range, so we were pretty pleased with that. However, the limited vision I'd had in that eye was still missing.

So they ultrasounded my eyeball. CREEEPY!!

The result, the good Dr believes I have a detached retina. These words dismayed me a bit, as 30 years ago that pretty much meant "game over". Nowadays, not so much apparently. The Doc sent me to a retina specialist.

So they ultrasounded my eyeball. AGAIN! (STILL creepy!)

End result, poor Jon was awake till around 6pm that day (thanks again for driving me down!) and I go into surgery next Wednesday. For cornea transplant, cataract surgery and retina repair.

I'm not thrilled about the surgery, although I am about the prospects (yes, I know there's a fair chance nothing will work right. but still!). My poor wife is about to worry herself into an early grave, though. She's VERY concerned about the fact that it's an outpatient proceedure and I'll be in a "bouncy car" for 3 hours after I'm out that day. Love ya hun! We'll be fine, though!

Tags: cataract, cornea, eyeball, retina, surgery
Current Location: Corner office
Current Mood: crazy

You're The Mists of Avalon!

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

You're obsessed with Camelot in all its forms, from Arthurian legend
to the Kennedy administration. Your favorite movie from childhood was "The Sword in
the Stone". But more than tales of wizardry and Cuban missiles, you've focused on
women. You know that they truly hold all the power. You always wished you could meet
Jackie Kennedy.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Current Location: Corner Offfice
Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Machinery hum

Link: The Alignment Test written by xan81 on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Tags: lawful good
Current Mood: amused

Your results:
You are Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)

Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 85% Wash (Ship Pilot) 80% Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 65% Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 60% Alliance 55% Inara Serra (Companion) 45% River (Stowaway) 40% Derrial Book (Shepherd) 35% Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 35% Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 30% A Reaver (Cannibal) 20%

Dependable and trustworthy. You love your significant other and you are a tough cookie when in a conflict.

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

Current Mood: amused

Well, for any out there following this particular line... here's an update.

I sit at my computer at 4am... I am fully wide awake. I've been asleep (or drugged that way, at times) for pushing 16 hours of the last day. So yup, fully awake. My poor wife, however, is exhausted (mentally and physically) and is out cold.

We got to the Baptiste Medical Center in Memphis around 9:30 yesterday morning. Never having been there, I didn't know what to expect. The place is HUGE!! A kindly nurse, whom we asked for directions, showed us where to go. Fortunetly, we weren't all that far off target to begin with. We got checked in, and I was prepped (paperwork and all) and I got some good news. My insurance (which has a rollover effect if you don't use it all in a year) covered everything including my deductable! YaY for that worry!

About 11:30, they took us back to the surgical prep room and I had to put on one of those hospital gowns with no back. THIS is the point I started getting just a bit nervous... I mean, it's the first time I've had eye surgery in around 25+ years and I was a little nervous. Fortunetly, the nurse came in soon after and gave me a feel good pill (and OMG a sip of water to get it down. I was SOOO thirsty by that point!). Falling asleep, for what I thought was maybe half an hour, I woke up 2 hours later to find that it was time for surgery.

I was given a choice of being fully put to sleep or just having localized anesthetics (yeah, spelling I know). I took the localized stuff. Nurse told me I probably wouldn't even remember her talking to me, the stuff has an amnesiac type effect on it. Well, they must not have given me enough of it. I remember the entire process. Apparently I also cracked up my doctor a bit because I talked through the whole thing (those who know me know I chatter chat when I'm nervous, but I felt too good to be nervous so it must have been the drugs.)

After surgery. I recall it being around 6pm, I think, I hurt a bit at that time. My wonderful wife packed me up and took me home. We swung by a subway and picked up a nice plain sandwich (I'd not eaten in over 18 hours at that point) to give me something in my stomach. Poor Sansey was desperate, though I didn't know it, to find a Wal-greens or SOMETHING open at that time of night. Doc had prescribed me pain meds, but nothing was open.

The sandwich was a mistake, the drugs in my system weren't letting me keep anything down... but my missus, breaking the laws of physics, got us back home in time to hit our local wal-greens before it closed (barely, unless they are open till 10pm). I'm not sure what vicadin is, but it suuure does feel good.

Last update to this point. I woke up at about 3am. Staggered into the bathroom for my morning business (and already thinking pain med, my eye HURT when I first woke up and tried to focus on anything) I found that it looked like I had been crying blood tears all night. I cleaned myself up as best I could, but the bandage directly on my eye I'd been told to let Sansey handle, instead of myself... so I've still got some red there.

Anyway, I'm going to find something (simple) to do for the next 4ish hours. My pain meds have kicked in so I'm feeling better, thank GOD I've got a contact lense to wear as well, since my eyeglasses will NOT fit with this patch on.

Oh, one last note, kinda important that I'd forgotten. The Doc said the surgery had gone VERY well. I'm hopeful, once I get checked out later this week by my local Doc, that the end results stayed good. :)

Tags: eyeball, loving wife, surgery
Current Location: The backroom
Current Music: what's in my head

Well... in the morning, I'll be going down to Memphis to see a new eye doc. He's been working on, for the laymen, "front end replacement" for the eye. This is pretty exciting, as that's all that is wrong with my bad eye! However, there are tons of questions... how reliable is his new procedure? How many patients has he worked with that have 30+ year catastrophic eye trauma? IF everything works, can he give me a green eye to counterpoint my natural blue left one??

In any case, it should be exciting... about 70% exciting and 30% scared I think. Or maybe it's 30% excited and 70% scared... either way, it lets you know you are ALIVE! Regardless of how good or bad the outcome will be, for now I'm alive and life is good.


Side Note : Life is good. Sooo many people have issues admitting that. If you have food on the table and a roof over your head. A family (kids or spouse or both) that love you. Relatively decent heatlh. MAYBE even a hobby or two and some friends. THEN life is good. Period. Those who deny it (hmm, certain cousin of mine maybe?) need a good smack upside the head and a boot in their backside. Life could always be better, yup. But for now, if the above is met, life is good!

Tags: eyeball, jesus saves, life
Current Location: the backroom
Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: Third Eye Blind

It's 4am. Again. My poor spouse doesn't understand. When I've got 14 hours a day tied up in work (far more than I'd like) I tend to try not to miss much my social activities. When I was younger, I would stay up for days at a time, considering sleep to be wasted/missed time. As I'm older now, I sleep when I can, knowing sleep to be a needed thing and to be enjoyed. Still, it bothers me that the average person spends 1/3rd of their life asleep.

Enough rambling for now. As I wake up some more, coherent thoughts begin to filter through my head, at least a little.

Last night a topic was on my mind, alot. It deals with identifying the wolves.

It seems to me that our country has issues knowing who the wolves are. In the "war on drugs" that we've waged, who are the wolves? The drug makers/dealers? The users? In the music industries war on illegal music transfers over the internet, who are the wolves? The people who download the music? The people who upload it? The folks who make file transfer possible?

The reason I ask this question is simple. Ask a hunter, with a wolf population problem, how to kill the wolts to s, you hunt the rabbits. With fewer rabbits to s, you hunt the rabbits. With fewer rabbits to keep the wolves alive, you'll have fewer wolves.

In the war on drugs, we've been going after the wolves. The drug dealers and manufacturers. We've been taming the rabbits and not really hurting their population... the rabbits, of course, being the users. Simple economics tells us that if supply is low and demand high, suppliers will continue to try to meet that demand.

In the musy keep attacking the tools of file transfering andy keep attacking the tools of file transfering and attacking the downloaders themselves. Their problem is not identifying the wolves correctly (the downloaders) but failing to realize how to HUNT the wolves. The people they need to be after are the uploaders. The rabbits. One uploader might well 'feed' 1,000,000 downloaders.


Bear in mind that, at 4am, I'm probably not the most rational of men. AND that these are just my opinions. But it's a known fact that if you kill off the food source and you kill the predators that prey off of it.ly and you kill the predators that prey off of it. I also realize that the above statements might seem to be in direct oposition to each other. However, consider this (then I'm logging off).... with drugs, you have a great demand/desire going on. With music, it's mostly opportunity.

Current Location: Zombie Land
Current Mood: apathetic