HOW THE BLEB SAVES MY SIGHT

Glaucoma is a sneaky disease. People's eyes often have problems with draining the excess fluid from inside. Consequently, everybody with the malady is unaware of it. Excess pressure damages the optic nerve, causing irreversible blindness if it's left untreated. Patients are advised by ophthalmologists to have their eye pressure checked regularly to prevent this damage from occurring.

Unfortunately for me, my mother wasn't aware of this danger and how serious it can be. In the autumn of 1973, I complained to her that I was seeing rainbows around lights  with my left eye. Mom promised to call a ophthalmologist about it but she put it off for five months. By that time, I had lost most of the vision in my left eye.

Complicating maters was that my brain compensated for the lost vision by making it seem to me that I still had vision in my left eye. Otherwise, I'd have complained much more strenuously once I couldn't see with it.

I began taking eye drops in 1975. The medicine helped for a while but by 1984, my pressures went up alarmingly. Laser surgery didn't help because the holes made by ophthalmologists soon healed over.

Conventional surgery in 1986 worked for a while but I was soon back at the clinic with high eye pressures. After conventional surgery again in 1990, my pressures stayed low for a few years.

By March of 1995, they had gone up alarmingly. The new ophthalmologist felt shocked that my previous doctor had let the pressure build up while saying he couldn't see anything wrong. The new specialist pulled some strings and got me into surgery that week rather than waiting the usual three to five months.

Instead of cutting a hole and leaving it that way, the new ophthalmologist put in a plastic tube called a Bleb. It's worked remarkably well for me during the past nine years. Never have I needed another operation since.

My poor vision has always caused me grief. In Deliverance from Jericho: Six Years in a Blind School, I wrote about being sent five-hundred miles from home for months at a stretch. I also mentioned my poor vision in When A Man Loves a Rabbit: Learning and Living with Bunnies. Both books are available from the Bruce Atchison's books page.

How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity shows how cruel a certain house church was to me regarding my poor vision. You can read more about how God led me out of that sick congregation at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.

THE PAIN WAS WORTH IT.

Which experience have you had that was extremely painful, yet it yielded great benefits for you? For me, it was an eye operation that I had on this date in 1995. Previous operations to lower the pressure in my right one didn't help much so I had little hope that this operation would work for long.

My eye trouble started a week previously when my vision fogged up and I saw rainbows around lights. I knew that was the signal that my pressure was high. When I saw my ophthalmologist, Dr. Casey, he fast-tracked me into surgery. Usually, it took, and still takes, months to get a surgery date.

I rode the bus to the University Hospital after lunch on the day of my surgery and waited for my turn in surgery. Wearing that hospital gown while lying on a stretcher in the rotunda made me feel naked. I had heard of overcrowding in hospitals but this was ridiculous. At least we had white sheets hung around us to keep us out of sight from the public.

Instead of a general anesthetic, the doctor gave me a local as well as something to relax me. Even so, the operation hurt like nothing I ever felt in that eye before. As the doctor moved my eyeball to insert a tube, called a bleb, he explained that it would drain the excess fluid out of my eye and it wouldn't seal itself up. Past operations were merely holes cut into my eyeball. The bleb would ensure that I wouldn't need another operation for years. That's what Dr. Casey said as he worked on my right eye.

After what seemed like hours, though it wasn't more than thirty minutes, the torture ended. I lay on the stretcher in the rotunda again until a friend came to drive me home after he left work. Because of a shortage of beds, patients were released as quickly as possible. What a vast difference from when I was a child. I had my cataracts removed when I was four years old and I stayed in hospital for six weeks.

As a result of that bleb insertion back in 1995, I haven't needed any eye drops or pills to control my right eye's Glaucoma. It has remained at the proper level year after year. I'm grateful to Dr. Casey for rushing me into surgery and inserting that bleb. It has preserved what little vision I have left for all these years.

Because How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity was a memoir about God leading me into the light of his truth, I mentioned this operation only in passing. This newly-published memoir is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.