Thursday, April 14, 2011

Retinal Scans Came Along With The Eye Exam

Left retina. It kind-of looks like Mars, or maybe a breast prepared with makeup for entering a championship Brazilian samba competition.

The nipple-like thing is where the optic nerve is to be found. There is a bit of eyelid at the upper left. The grayish sand dunes at the lower periphery are the scars from the 1994 retinal reattachment surgery, which they did on my left eye. Following Planetary Science practice, I dub the region of grayish sand dunes the Pontus Tenebrae (Sea of Darkness).

The retinal reattachment was interesting. They compress your eyeball with a silicone band (which was intentionally left behind, and which binds my left eyeball to this day), then freeze the eyeball from the outside-in with liquid nitrogen, in order to bring the retina and its substrate back into solid contact. They also did some laser spot-welding to help the retina reacquaint itself with the back of the eyeball.

Post-surgery was fun too. They had put me under with sodium pentothal (truth serum). When I awoke, everyone in the recovery room was laughing. "Why are you laughing?" I asked. They stopped laughing, and then one of the doctors said "Oh, nothing!" Then they started laughing again. My eyeball looked dead for a week. It still doesn't look quite 'normal' (my left eyelids always seems to be a bit more-closed than the right eyelids).

Right retina. There are even a few eyelashes visible at the bottom right. The grayish scars from lots of spot-welding are visible here too, in the upper-left: the Mare Vanitas (Sea of Emptiness). The maculae are visible in both images as a kind of darkish smudge next to the optic nerve.

Things look stable. I'm updating my glasses lenses so I can once-again have scratch-resistant lenses, rather than my current scratched-up scratch resistant coatings.

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