Rare Luck

Holiday Classics: felled by food.
Ian and Marianne Brown after Thanksgiving dinner, 2010.

On Sunday, December 17, while driving home from visiting with his father in Kitchener, Bruce felt something was wrong with his right eye.

Assuming his prosthetic lens -- installed years ago to treat cataracts -- needed some stray protein scrubbed off, Bruce made an appointment with his doctor at the Kensington Eye Clinic.

"Nope," said the eye doc, "What you got I can't fix." 

He sent Bruce to see another eye doc, who declared Bruce's retina badly torn.

The new eye guy, Dr. Yan, put a small bubble of gas in Bruce's eye, told him to stay home and hold his head so that the bubble floated to the back of his eye (think of how your head sits in a massage chair) and come back on Friday.

On Friday the 22nd, Bruce got the full vitrectomy treatment, where you voluntarily let a person stick a needle in your eye and suck out some of the viscous goo in there so as to make room for an even bigger bubble of gas. In case you're wondering, the gas is propane. It is nonreactive and will slowly absorb into the body, so the bubble dissipates without further surgical intervention.

But you can't fly with a bubble of gas in your eye.

This was sad for us in that we had planned, and I had already paid for in full, a week away in Lisbon from January 14-21.

I hadn't gotten insurance, so was prepared to take the 50% penalty for cancellation three weeks before departure. But fortune intervened. 

On December 20, I got an e-mail from Air Transat saying they were very sorry but they needed to cruelly snatch away the Club Seats I'd booked for the return flight. 

They gave me three options: fly economy and take the refund for the downgraded seats; change the dates; cancel for full refund. 

Sweet.

Better still, when Bruce went back to the eye doc between Christmas and New Years, the doc declared the retina reattached. 

Bruce needs to take 4 (!) weeks off of work and continue to hold his head so the bubble stays at the back of his eyeball.

Same as with my hip replacement, the surgery fixed the problem almost right away. The long recovery is from the procedure.

Thanks for reading!

Stay warm!

Karen