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  • Writer's pictureJon

Updated: Mar 13, 2019

Symptoms

  • Constant feeling of pin pricks in my eyes.

  • Extreme light sensitivity.

  • Don't want to open my eyes. Its easier to take pain pills and sleep.

  • Lots of tearing in my eyes. Opening them after a few minutes of having them closed results in a stream of tears down my face.

  • Vision still very blurry

The feeling of pin pricks on my eye balls continued throughout the night and into Friday morning. I woke up around 3 AM to re-up on my pain killers pills. I was starting to get angry at some of the people who had posted their experience and said it was only mildly inconvenient. This really hurt.


My wife convinced me that I needed to call the doctor as it seemed worse than I had anticipated. Dr Mandel has a nice women who works at the front desk and part of her job is to intercept stupid questions and tell patients to calm down. She said the pain is normal and asked when I last took the lighter pain medicine. Since it hadn't been 24 hours, she said I couldn't take the heavier stuff until the next day (Saturday). My wife jumped in and said we needed to talk to the Doctor. She said he'd call me back, which he did within about 20 minutes. Dr Mandel said this was the normal pain that you get two to three days after (in my mind, I was really annoyed because they said nothing about day two being bad). He gave me the OK to take some of the heavy stuff and said to stop if it make me nauseous.


The better pain pills helped distract me a bit, but it was mostly another day of closed eyes.


I was getting antsy not having checked in at work. The next week I had a big conference that I had to be at and was praying that nothing would blow up in preparation for that. I was also starting to worry that I wouldn't be able to go back to work at all on Monday given all this pain. I tried to read my work email from my phone, but could barely make anything out. We were in the process of hiring interns at my office and I was sent a stack of 25 resumes and was told to pick the 5 to 10 of them that I wanted to interview on Monday. I laughed at this email because there was no way I was going to look at the small print on someone's resume. One of my colleagues graciously agreed to widdle it down for me.


By the evening I was starting to feel a little better, but I was still anxious that Saturday would be even worse.


Oh yeah, I think this was the first day I took a shower, which was a fun exercise of trying to avoid having any water touch my face. I have no idea what a splash of water would feel like on my eye balls and I didn't want to find out.


  • Writer's pictureJon

Updated: Mar 13, 2019

Symptoms

  • Extreme light sensitivity. Hard to look at my phone, the TV, or have the window shades open.

  • Groggy from all the pain pills

  • Can't keep eyes open for more than a few minutes

  • Very blurry vision. Can't read my phone or see much on TV.


I woke up the day after surgery (Thursday) pretty early as the drugs wore off and I was getting tired of sleeping so much. It was still hard to open my eyes for more than a few minutes, if not just a few seconds. I kept my sunglasses on for most of the day and never left the apartment. The shades stayed closed. I tried to listen to some music and podcasts, which was a frustrating process to get them going since I could barely see my phone.


In preparation for the surgery, I turned the font up on my phone to what seemed like a ridiculously large size and also increased the scaling on my computers... turned out that wasn't even large enough. Between the brightness of the phone and the struggle to read it, I pretty much just gave up.


As the day progressed my eyes started to bother me more and more. It felt like pins poking me in the eye over and over again. It was hard to open them at all and when I did it was like a flood of tears would pour out of my eyes. The doctor had told me that day 3 would be the worst. I had my surgery on a Wednesday and was told the heavier pain pills were for Saturday, which would be the worst day. So when it started to hurt on Thursday, I started freaking out thinking about how bad Saturday would be.


Another dose of pain pills and some Tylenol PM and I finally got myself to sleep. This was a tough day.


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