April 15th After a six-hour flight from NJ, I headed to the office and noticed my right eye was still blurry. Later that night, it changed, and I knew I had a problem. I could see what looked like a line of black oil swishing along the bottom of my right eye. It was creepy, so I did what every sane person would do; I googled it. “Emergency” appeared in every search. I was set to deliver a sales conference across the country that had consumed me for months, and I did not have time to take care of this minor inconvenience. I could not have been more wrong.
April 16th – On Sunday morning, I googled ERs and plugged the first address I found into my Uber app. It was here that divine intervention took the wheel. I told my Uber driver where I was going, and he suggested another, closer, larger hospital where his girlfriend worked as a nurse.
At 7:00 am, the ER was empty, so I was quickly ushered into an exam room. They found someone who could operate the fancy machine to take photos of my eye, and based on the images, everything looked good. Intervention 2 – The on-call ophthalmologist was in-house, a rarity for Sunday morning. She dilated my eyes and told me she would return in 20 minutes as another nurse ushered me into a makeshift exam room that doubled as a closet. By now, it was 8:30 am. I pulled the orange from my purse and asked if anyone would object if I ate it because the room might smell of orange. That would be a dangerous move.
Twenty minutes became 30, then 40 before she returned. By now, the black oil was gaining landscape. She did a peripheral exam that I promptly failed, did a cursory view of my now fully dilated pupils, and walked out without a word.
I could hear her talking to someone, “Six tears, the retina is detached….” This is where naivete is a blessing because I did not understand the severity of the situation.
She returned to the closet, saying, “We need to get you into surgery immediately. When did you last eat anything? Remember the orange? Because I would need anesthesia, we had to wait eight hours, and surgery was scheduled for 5:30 pm. I was instructed not to move my head rapidly, no texting or reading. I now understood the severity of the situation.
#retinaldetachment
foursetsofeyes 