51–60 of 191 posts
Not to brag, but to brag, this is nothing. I’ve had a gas bubble injected into my eye to repair a detached retina (pneumatic retinopexy). https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/w...
- The aforementioned gas bubble
- The same but an oil bubble, when you need the pressure to remain there for longer (and a second surgery to remove it)
- A 1mm bypass stent to reduce intra-ocular pressure
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make sure you understand the clinical outcomes and potential side-effects. When a cornea flap is cut, you are cutting a lot of innervation to the cornea surface, this for many people means fairly persistent dry-eyes. In addition the scaring of the cornea in the incision flap rim, can also create visual artefacts like Halos, more visible during nightime as your pupil expands and may catch some of the visual distortion…
I am suffering from moderate dry eye now and was suffering from severe dry eye in the past. I once had a day at work where the pain was so bad I thought: This is it. I can‘t keep on working, I will lose my job and live on disability from now on. After some conversations with healthy people, I learned that many can not even imagine dry eye pain. One sentence stuck out: „I didn‘t know eyes could hurt.“ What I wanna say…
Around 2.5 million ocular injections are performed a year in the US and the busiest retina specialists perform as many as 50 per day.[1]
As many as 11 million people in the United States have some form of age-related macular degeneration. This number is expected to double to nearly 22 million by 2050.
Many patients require periodic injections for the rest of their lives
https://assets.bmctoday.net/retinatoday/pdfs/0520rt_AMD_MacC...
Bedside manner of the doctors and technicians is the most important aspect of it. I have a Doc who wonderfully calm and hires a pretty good staff.
One thing the writer doesn't mention is how long all this takes. For me it's usually 2 hours of my time. I go in, get my eye scanned, then dilation drops are applied, then I wait 45 minutes for them to kick in. After that they, bring me back into a room and start applying various things to my eye: antihistamine drops, numbing agent, something to sterilize my eye, and an antibiotic (I think). All the eye prep takes 20 minutes or so. Then the doc steps in to do his thing, and that takes all of 5-10 minutes.
For those curious, you don't see the needle, you end up looking toward the bridge of your nose and the doc comes from the opposite direction. You don't see it inside your eyeball either. You do see the fluid stream in and it dissipates quickly. If there is a bubble in the solution you end up with one or a few black dots floating around your vision, those dissipate in a day or two. You don't feel anything other than a little pressure on your eye. Afterward, you might have some eye pain. This depends on how good of a stick it was and how your allergies are doing. Sometimes you are relatively pain free afterward, but other times it feels like your eye got walloped and your eye will be sore for a few days.
Based on stories I've heard from emotionally immature doctor friends and my own experience being a little more confrontational with my doctors, he most likely didn't know the answers to your questions and was too proud to say, "I don't know."
It seems many forget that, at the end of the day, doctors are people, too, with just as many flaws and emotions as the rest of us. It's unfortunate that this affects quality of care, but it's a fact of life in every industry.
The best thing you can do for yourself in such a situation is to prepare yourself before appointments and remember the humanity of doctors during appointments. If your doctor is being dodgy about answering questions, let them know that it's okay if they don't know and that you won't think anything less of them for it. If it's an urgent matter, suggest looking it up together so that your doctor can provide context for whatever research you manage to find.
A doctor is like a contractor you've hired to inspect and maintain your body. As with any contractor, if you want them to do a good job, you have to work with them, as a team.
(Ophthalmologist): To any future HN reader scared by those intraocular injections: don't fear them. I'm on my way to the operating room and going to perform cataract surgery under topical (=eyedrops only) anesthesia, as I always do, and as most surgeons today do. Patients won't feel anything except water slightly flowing on the eye surface. The surgical knife is 2.2mm wide : the 25 Gauge needle is 0.260mm wide. Anest…
How are you using the surgical knife in your intravitreal injection procedure?
Any thoughts on how often patients can see the needle? I always thought it was out of the visual axis, but some reports in this thread mention seeing it !?
(Ophthalmologist): To any future HN reader scared by those intraocular injections: don't fear them. I'm on my way to the operating room and going to perform cataract surgery under topical (=eyedrops only) anesthesia, as I always do, and as most surgeons today do. Patients won't feel anything except water slightly flowing on the eye surface. The surgical knife is 2.2mm wide : the 25 Gauge needle is 0.260mm wide. Anest…
I'm still impressed by how well those drops worked. And, yeah. All I could see was red (blood), and all I felt was just a prick of something sharp. Was done within probably 10-15 minutes.
I have a lot of sympathy for the author. I've been thinking about getting LASIK (or SMILE as it seems to be gaining popularity in France) since friend got it and says it's life-changing, and since I've started considering it I sometimes have nightmares about the procedure. I already had some minor surgery with local anesthesic and I didn't have any anxiety, but there's something about having something done to the eye…
> We briefly discussed my anxiety, but his immediate solution was the anti-anxiety drug. I made it clear that I was worried about the procedure and wanted to know more details about it. He didn’t want to explain the procedure beyond “we’ll inject medication that will help preserve your vision”, and he avoided answering repeated questions. Maybe he tried to shield me from the details and not confirm my worst fears. Ba…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am suffering from moderate dry eye now and was suffering from severe dry eye in the past. I once had a day at work where the pain was so bad I thought: This is it. I can‘t keep on working, I will lose my job and live on disability from now on. After some conversations with healthy people, I learned that many can not even imagine dry eye pain. One sentence stuck out: „I didn‘t know eyes could hurt.“ What I wanna say…
Indeed, the idea of "informed consent" is complete non-sense because the layperson will have no way to understand what the potential consequences entail - and personally I was lied to multiple times by LASIK before getting the procedure done.
I would love to do lasik! But any potential worsening of my dry eyes is not worth it. I would still sacrifice my whole fortune to have healthy eyes again. (to be clear: I did not have lasik, but I probably suffer from permanent isotretinoin damage)