Tag: surgery Posts

On Wednesday, I’ll get to meet Dr. Peter Dolman, who is one of the best ocuplastics surgeons in the country. I’ve been on the wait list for about three months now, and I really have no idea what to expect to be honest. I went to the extra trouble to try and make sure my CT and MRI scans were there waiting for him, but I suspect that somehow they will have been lost come Wednesday, and we’ll have nothing to talk about. Truth is, I really don’t know what the end result will be. Tonight I told some friends that it’s really a lose-lose at this point, which is true from my perspective. Option one is to cut my face open again, pull out the plastic, and reconstruct my orbital floor with titanium. There’s obvious risk to that surgery, as well as about six weeks of recovery to go […]

I ended up doing a bunch of work on Saturday night, and just hung out close to home. A quick twitter by me saying I was going to have a few casual drinks at my place led to Dave showing up for a few beers. After that, we went down to the Six Acres to meet up with Trevor, and then ultimately over to Matt’s house for a few quick drinks. When I got home that night, I realized just how tired I was. I passed out on the couch around 4am, and quite literally woke up sometime around 5pm last night. I got up here and there to answer my phone and check email, but I just couldn’t force my body to wake up. Last night I put a movie on, and then curled up on the couch with a blanket. About half way through the movie, I turned […]

I just got back from an appointment with my plastic surgeon. After two surgeries, I am still left with a few problems, the first of which is a slight visual dissimilarity between my left and right eye, and the second is double vision above my mid line. Based on some recent measurements I had done, my surgeon proposed four courses of action: Do nothing Remove a bit of skin from eyelid on my “good” eye to make it sort of match the appearance of my “bad” eye Adjust the eyelid of my “bad” eye to make it better match my “good” eye. Open me back up and either adjust the current implant, augment it with another piece of plastic, or rebuild the orbital floor using a titanium mesh So, it’s decision time. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but since option #4 has the ability to restore […]

This is a pretty important week in the life of Duane. On Tuesday I’ll meet up with my plastic surgeon which might potentially be the last meeting I have with him regarding this whole affair. My first meeting was about twelve months ago and resulted in two surgeries to my eye socket. I’ve spent this last year bouncing between doctors offices, getting eye exams, several CT scans, and will meet this week to probably wrap everything up. In terms of my vision, it’s still not perfect. I see pretty much everything perfectly below the midline (i.e. looking straight or down), but as I look up I tend to see double of everything. I have sort of naturally adjusted by automatically raising my head when looking up so the object I’m looking at is straight on, but it’s a fairly big pain in the ass for me, especially when it’s dark […]

Today I had a specialist appointment to fully quantify the damage to my vision from my accident last year. The appointment was about an hour of waiting in the waiting room, twiddling my thumbs, and an hour of experiments. They were forced to dilate my eyes, which means not only am I totally sensitive to light right now, but I’m having a very hard time reading anything. Not sure the verdict, but it’s looking pretty likely that my double vision in my upgaze is probably permanent. I can potentially compensate for this by changing my eyeglass prescription to have a slight upward taper in the lens, but since it doesn’t really interfere with my job, I’m ok for now I guess. While another surgery might be able to fix everything, I was told that at this point there is nearly as much risk as there is potential reward, so it’s […]

Nearly one year ago today, four guys that I had never met before decided it would be a good idea to put my face through the plate glass window of a 7-11. Prior to that one moment in time, now forever etched into my memory, I was upstairs at the Railway Club in Vancouver, enjoying a few beers with some friends in celebration of their wedding earlier that night. Upon exiting the building, somewhere between catching a cab and eating a bag of nachos, I overheard these four guys harassing a bunch of girls just a few feet away from me. People have told me after the fact that perhaps I should have just kept my mouth shut, hailed a cab, and gone home. But instead, because I thought it was the right thing to do, I suggested to the group that perhaps everyone had had too much to drink, […]

I had a meeting with my plastic surgeon today to talk about the last surgery I had. It’s been a little over five months now, so in terms of results, everything should be stable. In my opinion, the position of my eye, while better, is still not perfect. In addition, I still have double vision in the top-left version of my visual field. My plastic surgeon did a few simple tests on me, mainly involving looking at my eye and tracking its movement using a finger. At least to my surgeon, the results are acceptable and do not warrant another surgery. For now, I have a few referrals to some eye doctors that will measure the actual displacement of my eye, and suggest possible other means to correct the double vision (either different glasses or perhaps muscle surgery on my left eye). I have, however, always been opposed to what […]

This morning I went downstairs and checked the mail, and was surprised to see a bill from the ministry of health. It would seem that the government wants me to pay for the ambulance that took me to the hospital the night I ended up with multiple lacerations to my head and face, and five broken bone segments in my face. While I’m obviously appreciative for our medical system, considering I have had two surgeries now that I haven’t had to pay for, given that our health care system is supposed to be covered, I’m pretty surprised that I have to pay this at all.

On Friday, I met up briefly with Rebecca down at the Six Acres in Gastown for a few drinks on a patio. It was a good way to start a Friday afternoon, and since I had only woken up a few hours prior, I was definitely in the mood to drink and grab something to eat. Afterwards, we went down to the west-end for some pizza, and to hang out with John, who was busy playing with Dave Olsen’s new microphone on his computer. A bunch of my new blogger-type friends (most of which I originally ran into down at Northern Voice) were down at DemoCamp the other day, but unfortunately I wasn’t feeling up to venturing out of the house, so I stayed home and checked out Rebecca’s live blog of the event. Apparently for short notice, there was great interest and turn-out. Rebecca, obviously excited I’m taking her […]