Category Archives: General

Well, that was exciting

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Looks like I may need a new mower.

As you can probably tell, my mower is overdone toast. A smoldering wreck. A shadow of its former self. Only a short time earlier the mower had a nice green hood over the engine, a steering wheel, a yellow seat, and tires.

My original plan had been to scalp the lawn in our front yard, to get rid of the tall, dead blades to prepare for new growth. I brought out the riding mower and proceeded. The grass was so tall that it made mounds of dry grass with each swath. I was plowing through the dry grass, pushing running over and pushing aside the piles.

After several trips down the length of the yard, I felt a lot of heat on my legs. I looked down, and flames were shooting up on either side of the mower.

I jumped off and ran with my creaky knees up the yard and around to the back of the house, where I store our hose. I dragged it down as far as it would reach, and quickly realized it was not far enough. I ran back up to the house and dialed 911. The fire truck arrived within minutes, and the fire fighters began spraying. They brought it under control pretty quickly.

You can see the fire fighter spraying into the edge of the woods around the yard. The fire was spreading pretty quickly through the grass up the slope of our yard, but, fortunately, only barely edging into the woods around the yard. I think we have had enough rain lately that even despite a few warm, sunny days, the leaf and pine needle litter in the woods was damp.

The burned area reached about halfway up to the house. I could probably have kept the fire from reaching the house using our garden hose, but it would have been risky. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

One of the fire fighters said they would normally not drive their truck, all 40,000+ pounds of it, up our driveway, but they wanted to make sure they could protect the house. I told him I would not complain if they cracked our driveway.

And then they drove up to the top of the driveway, turned around, and were on their way.

It was an exciting afternoon. Leah was worried, almost to the point of “sick.” Our big dog, Zoe, apparently went crazy in the house. I didn’t have time to worry or go crazy. My hands still show some black from helping move the fire fighter’s hose around in the yard, despite washing several times, and my knees are a little more stiff and sore than normal, but aside from that, we all seem OK. We have had a little rain tonight, probably just enough to keep any stray embers from igniting. The grass will probably look better in the burned area, but we may lose some pine trees. If you notice in the first photo, the trunk of one pine is charred up quite high. That shows how high the flames from the mower were.

Way back when I was trying to decide what to plant in the front yard, I chose Zoysia because although it is normally mowed quite short, it can also be allowed to grow. If it grows without cutting, it makes a thick, lush lawn that dogs love to lie in. The down side is that cutting all that growth in the winter produces huge quantities of dead, dry grass that piles up as you mow. Now I’m having to rethink the whole concept of infrequent mowing. I’m afraid it will mean mowing about every two weeks, possibly more often, to keep the grass short enough to make the winter scalping safe. And that means a new mower.

Walking through summer

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As both of my long-time readers know, I take my dogs for a walk down Fouche Gap Road almost every day. As I walked along the road one day in September, while it was still summer, I felt transported to my summertime youth. This was a typical walk down a typical country road on a typical summer day. Listen to the cicadas; this is the sound of summer as I remember it. These are annual cicadas rather than the more famous periodic cicadas.

For some reason I have not been able to insert the video the way I normally do, so I have to insert a link here. Click on the link, then, when you are finished, hit the “back” button on your browser.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/summer.mp4

Not that many days later I took the dogs for another walk, and this time the sounds were different.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/fall.mp4

If you listen carefully, you can hear acorns falling out of the trees. You may also hear a pileated woodpecker in the background. Of course every time I started recording, it seemed like the acorns stopped falling, and when I stopped recording, they started falling again. Shy oak trees, I guess.

We have lots of oaks on the mountain, and this year was a particularly good one for acorns, a mast year. They accumulated almost in drifts at the side of the road.

Zoe likes acorns, but she can’t figure out what to do with them once she picks them up.

Jello in a spirit level

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I decided that rather than try to describe what my vision has been and currently is, I would post some images. You may find this hard to beliee, but these images are not from a biology textbook; I drew them myself.

First, this is what normal vision (sort of) looks like:

Each of your eyes see its own image of this odd-looking dog with the odd-looking gait. They are slightly different, but your brain seamlessly merges them into one coherent image. You are normally not aware that there are two separate images in the overlapping area, but the differences in the images are what allows you to perceive the different distances to various objects that you see.

After my surgery, the vitreous in my right eye was replaced with sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). The optical properties of SF6 are different from that of the vitreous, and the eye can’t focus an image through it. That means that my right eye’s image was blurry, and objects in my field of view seemed to be in a different place from what my left eye was reporting. This yielded an image kind of like this:

Imagine that I was looking at a table. My left eye saw it clearly, while my right eye saw a blurry, displaced images. My brain couldn’t figure out how to merge these images, so it basically didn’t. It just gave me two different images at the same time. This made it essentially impossible to read or to drive. Since I spent Thursday afternoon after the surgery through Sunday with my head down, reading was about all I could do. I solved this problem by closing my right eye.

As the body absorbed the SF6, the bubble shrank. For several days, this is what I saw with my right eye:

The very top of my visual field was clear, while all of the rest was blurry. There was not enough clear vision to allow my eye to focus at normal distances, so I still had to close my right eye to read, and I couldn’t drive.

Eventually, the bubble shrank to the point that it was beneath almost everything I needed to see, leaving something like this:

This image is from what I imagine driving though the foothills of the Sierras would look like.

And this is what my vision is like as I write this on Saturday night. I can look up where I’m writing and can see the mess of objects on our dining table, and, most importantly, i can tell where they are. I can reach out and touch the salt shaker without making several tries. Unfortunately, if I look down, I am looking through the bubble and I have no depth perception. A Walmart employee had to help me put my credit card in the reader tonight because I kept missing the slot

If I look straight down, I can see the entire bubble as a circle filling maybe 80 percent of the entire field of view. The bubble jiggles when I shake my head, like a bowl of Jello. When I look up, the bubble reminds me of the bubble in a spirit level, finding its own level as I move my head around.

But, you are wondering, if this is a gas bubble within an eyeball otherwise filled with fluid, why is it floating at the bottom of my eye rather than the top? That’s an astute question, and I’m glad you asked. I wondered about that myself for a while, and then I remembered that the image the eye’s lens projects on the back of the eye is inverted; it’s upside down. The brain perceives it as right-side-up. Since the bubble is at the top of an upside down image, the brain thinks the bubble is actually at the bottom of my eye, thus fooling both itself and me.

Since I am still recuperating, I continue to spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Looking down still moves my bubble up (actually, down) into my field of view, so it’s still a real distraction. My solution now is to put blue masking tape on the right lens of a cheap pair of reading glasses.

I can still see the bubble in my right eye; in fact, in a lighted room, I can see the bubble with both eyes closed. But I can do a pretty good job of ignoring it. Right now there is a ghost image of the bubble covering about the bottom third of my laptop’s screen. It’s somewhat distracting, but much less than it would be without masking tape on my glasses.

There is one discouraging development. At my post-op appointment, while waiting for the doctor to come into the examination room, I discovered that I could focus on an object very close to my eye. I put a medical alert bracelet I was wearing up close and could read the fine print. It seemed to me that the blind spot and distortion I had been experiencing were gone. That made me very happy. Unfortunately, I have since determined that I still have a blind spot and distortion at my fovea. If I look at a straight line, I see something like this:

The images is blurred and distorted, and whatever is at the very center of the fovea is not visible. If I look directly at a small object, it disappears and is replaced by whatever surrounds it in my visual field. A small stone on a concrete surface disappears, and where it should be looks like more concrete. The effect might not be quite as bad as before my surgery, but it’s still there.

I have read that one’s vision after a vitrectomy can continue to improve for up to six months, so maybe it will get better. If it doesn’t, I suppose, and hope, that my brain will accomodate that deficiency and begin to ignore the blurring and distortion, replacing it with the better image from my left eye.

Surgery, and Christmas lights

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I had my right eye’s vitreous removed on Thursday. The surgery center is in Chattanooga, which is not Rome. It is, in fact, about an hour and a half away from our house. A long-time friend of my cousin was volunteered by my aunt to drive me. We left our house at around 5:30 AM, a time with which I am only theoretically familiar.

I was told beforehand not to eat after midnight before the surgery, so I expected to receive anesthesia. Imagine my delight when they told me I would only be sedated with Versed, and would be awake while the surgeon stuck sharp instruments into my eye. It was already to late to run, so I just accepted it, probably the way a condemned prisoner accepts that he is being led to the firing squad.

They draped my good eye, and possibly my bad eye, so I couldn’t see the team as they prepared their foot-long syringes and scalpels, or whatever they used. In fact, I couldn’t really see or feel anything they did. They did tell me that Versed induces amnesia, so it’s possible I just don’t remember. But it certainly seemed that I didn’t feel anything. I felt no pain, and my eye has not hurt since, except for a little twinge that feels muscular when I move my eyes around.

I got home before lunch, and proceeded to keep my head facing down as instructed for the rest of the day. This is because they injected a gas (sulfur hexafluoride, if you’re curious) into my eye to help press the retina up against the back of my eye, as I think I mentioned in my previous post. They put a patch on my eye, unfortunately not a black patch, so I was blind in that eye for the evening. As the evening progressed, I began to see a light display in my right eye. There were blue lights that looked like stars, and bright blue lines that looked like refugees from a neon sign. There were also what looked like wrestling black cats around the periphery of my field of view. That worried me a little. Not just the cats, but the whole thing.

Today, Friday, I went back to Chattanooga for a post-op checkup. We left at 6:15, a more civilized hour. More civilized, but not really civilized. They dilated my eye and looked inside, and then the doctor said it was good. They left the patch off and I found that all the literature I had read that said my vision would be very blurry after the surgery was true. I could actually see better with my right eye completely covered than after they removed the patch. The blurry eye’s vision was competing, and pretty successfully, with my better eye’s vision. I now know what people mean when they say they can see only vague shapes.

I also keep seeing someone sneaking up on my right side, but they disappear when I turn to look with my good eye.

The surgeon told me that the lights and lines are normal after retina surgery, so I am just relaxing and enjoying them. They had disappeared by Friday morning, but they have come back this evening as I write this. Now if I close my eyes I see a very pretty Christmas display, with strings of blue and white lights across my chest and a starry heaven above. I saw a big orange pumpkin that went all the way around the periphery of my vision just a while ago, and the black cats were back. At this moment, the residents of the surrounding hills have put up Christmas lights all along the ridge lines, and there is a large spherical ornament above, kind of like the moon, but with white lights inside.

Now that’s gone and I see orange bat wings.

It’s all quite amusing, but I hope not too long lasting. The surgeon said I can expect my vision to improve as the gas in my eye is absorbed. Right now it’s like looking through an aquarium. only worse. If I look straight down, my vision is slightly less blurry, but not enough that you would want me to drive you to the grocery store. They put a green, plastic bracelet around my wrist warning everyone that I have a gas in my eye which could cause permanent eye damage if I’m forced to go on an airline flight or drive to high altitudes. I discovered that if I brought the bracelet right up to my eye, close enough that it probably looks scary to anyone watching, I could read the text. It’s like using a magnifying glass. That was interesting, but the most interesting part is that I had to use the sharpest region of my eye to do that, the part that was damaged by my vitreomacular traction.The part that was completely blind before my surgery.

So, I can now see with that part of my eye, at least a little. It’s enough to give me some hope for a reasonable recovery.

In the meantime, I will keep everyone posted if I see anything more interesting in my bad eye.

Things fall apart

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As it turns out, Leah and I are the things that are falling apart.

Leah has continuing issues with pain; balance; and, I’m sorry to report, cognition. She has what is apparently a stress fracture in her right heel. I say “apparently” because when the medical people ask how it happened, we can’t point to a particular time, place, and event. They say, “Aha! Its a stress fracture,” because those can happen over time from overuse, or unconditioned use. In any case, her right heel, or driving heel, is fractured and it hurts, strangely enough, in places other than her heel. The orthopedist thinks she has some nerve disfunction that is preventing her heel from hurting as much as it should. As a result, she is using it more than she should.

The doctor also says the bone in her heel has apparently lost some density. He suspects she may have osteoporosis in other bones as well.

This was on top of her chronic pain from arthritis and some residual pain from her pinched nerve and the subsequent surgery to correct it.

The balance problem has been increasing for months. She is falling fairly often now, usually on her left side. She scrapes the skin off of her arm, and just about the time it has healed, she falls and scrapes more skin off. She is supposed to use a walker, but she usually leaves it some other place.

That is partly the result of her cognitive decline. Her memory is fading fast. She remembers things that did not happen, and doesn’t remember things that did happen. She asks the same question several times, minutes apart. I will tell her something (I hesitate to use the word “explain”) and she responds with, “You used to be able to explain things so that I could understand.” When we watch a television show, she has trouble following the plot and remembering the characters. It’s getting harder for her to find something that she is interested in. One of the worst parts of this is that she is aware of the decline.

The center cannot hold.

Only in this case, the problem is that the center is holding all too well. A couple of months ago I started noticing an annoying after-image in my right eye when I blinked. It got worse, and my vision started to blur. I made an appointment with my eye doctor, and he did some imaging that showed a distortion in the macula. He referred me to a retina specialist, who told me I have vitreomacular traction (let’s call that VMT). That means that the vitreous (people in the eye business use the word as a noun. I can’t help seeing it as an adjective, as in “vitreous gel,” the clear fluid in the eye. But, as I was saying, ) shrinks and doesn’t let go of the macula like it should. They (mainly google) tell me that the vitreous shrinks as we age, normally without symptoms or harm, but in some cases, it refuses to let go of the macula, with which it has been in intimate contact for many years. When that happens, it pulls the macula away from its proper position, causing visual distortion, blind spots, and eventually tears in the macula. The tears may actually be responsible for the blind spots; Google is silent on that issue. I now have a blind spot in the exact place that normally has the highest resolution. You know, the part you read with.

I have eye surgery scheduled for October 5 in Chattanooga, TN, about an hour and a half away from our home, depending on traffic. It would be hard enough if it were in our town, since Leah is not driving now. I am expecting to be gone a minimum of five hours, possibly more. Leah can’t drive now, possibly ever again, and I cannot leave her alone that long. Even if I could, she can’t handle Zoe, our big dog, and I will need someone to drive me home, and then back to Chattanooga again the next day for a post-op checkup.

My aunt has found a friend of her son who says he can drive me. He will soon learn that he will be driving Leah and two dogs as well. That’s the only solution I can think of to take care of her and the dogs. Fortunately, the weather should be cool enough in October that they can stay in the car for a while. I checked the surgery center on Google Earth, and it looks like there are shaded parking spots.

In addition to my VMT, I have a cataract in my left eye, which is now my good eye, but which used to be my not-good eye. It’s having to do double duty, seeing for itself and filling in the details that my right eye is missing. Unfortunately, the cataract is causing a slight bit of double vision, just enough to be annoying when i’m driving at night. So, soon after I get over the VMT surgery, called a vitrectomy, because they take out the vitreous, I will need cataract surgery. It seems that everyone my age has had cataract surgery, and it’s a breeze.

A vitrectomy is not quite a breeze, but it is a relatively short procedure. The recovery involves maintaining a face-down position for up to a week. That’s because the surgeon will inject a gas bubble into my eye intended to press against the macula and try to convince my body that the macula is supposed to be attached to the back of my eyeball. The gas bubble does no good if it’s pressing against the front of my eye, so I will need to be face down to keep it pressing against the back of my eye. The gas will eventually be absorbed by the body, and the eyeball will be filled with some sort of fluid that the body will generate. We all hope.

Various eye specialists, speaking through Google, tell me that the surgery has a reasonably good success rate. The first time I saw my specialist, he said if the VMT is caught early, surgery is 99 percent successful. The second time I saw him, he said it had an 85 percent success rate. I will not ask him again.

And, of course, success depends on your definition. The result of a successful vitrectomy is a gradual recovery in visual acuity. Although Google refuses to commit to a particular level of recovery, the strong implication is that my vision will never be as good as it was before VMT.

Google also tells me that if a person has VMT in one eye, the probability that they will have it in the other eye is greater than 50 percent.

It’s just barely possible that I have already had VMT in at least one eye, possibly my “good” eye. About two years ago I started noticing the after-image when I blinked. It was annoying but I didn’t worry too much about it. It gradually went away, and I didn’t even notice when it did. Was that VMT? I do not know. All that I know is that it was almost identical to what I experienced with a diagnosed VMT, and that in some cases VMT can spontaneously resolve without surgery.

Health issues are generally depressing. And, as anyone who has dealt with the cognitive decline of a loved one knows, that can also be depressing, and quite stressful. That’s one reason I have not been able to generate enough momentum to actually do anything lately, including write new blog posts. Maybe a few things will come back together in the not-too-distant future. Things not falling apart would be a nice change.