The hole or fenestration is supposed to let this air out.
where the fenestration is.
There's really no getting around this. I have very poor eyesight. By any average that's even worthy of the word, my eyeballs are somewhere between the average human and one of those little soaps they have in hotels.
The unsubtle ministrations of a virus, rubella, caused Peter's anomaly. Because this resulted in cataracts and an adhesion of the iris and cornea, it became necessary to remove the lens, meaning that I became one of the few, the proud, the aphakic. That is to say, I had no lens in my eye and so was compelled to wear really thick glasses.
Well, time went by as it's wont to do, and technology improved. To the point where I could give up the spectacles and move to a contact lens. A gas permeable fenestrated lens from the Victorian College of Optometry.
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| A shot of my left eye with the fenestrated lens inserted. Flourazine has been used to dye the lachrymal fluid (tears) so that the flow of fluid inside the lens can be seen. |
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| A slightly closer view.
Note the less coloured blob at the bottom, where air has been trapped under the
lens. The hole or fenestration is supposed to let this air out. |
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| The same eye, photographed in
blue light to make the fluorazine fluoresce. Note the dark shape where
tear film is absent, and the round lighter bit (left of picture) where the fenestration is. |
Well, that was going along pretty well for a few years, but eventually took its toll and the left cornea had to be replaced.
Then in 2006 my sister noticed something odd about my right eye. it didn't look too healthy. In fact, it looked a little bit like this:
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Not having seen it for a while she was a little concerned, and the next day (5 August 2006) we zoomed in to The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, where the ophthalmologists there had much the same concern. They told me the eye would have to be removed. The picture above was taken on 23 August 2006 when I came in to have it removed. This odd look was caused by extreme intraocular pressure pushing out around the ridge caused by previous surgery (in 1968).
Here it is again, from the side, showing just how bulbous it had got:
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So out it had to come. While I was in there and after the right eye had been removed (25 August 2006) the left eye, which had been on tenterhooks and looked a little bit like this:
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or this (closeup)
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had got even worse, and looked like this:
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For the exciting story of how they fixed it up, see my LiveJournal.
Have a look at that iris up there. Does it look okay to you? No, not to many of the specialists who had perused it over the years. One thing that was mentioned was that the iris no longer reacted to light. This certainly explained the searing glare of the sun bouncing off my admittedly pure white sheets - it alos went a long way to explaining the searing glare of the sun bouncing off the dark green ones, too. This inflexibility of the iris went on for some two years before anyone decided they'd better have a proper look at it. It turned out that the iris was so rigid with scar tissue, what with the various Molteno revisions and grafts and whatever that it could no longer flex well enough to contract or expand, and that last bit also explained why my night vision had dropped to the level of a cave fish by the middle of 2005.
This rigidity of the iris was making it flatten against the cornea, rubbing against it in what is called irido-corneal touch. This is not a good thing and so it was believed that this was causing the rejection of the previous grafts.
So the iris had to go.
This of course meant that I now had no iris to contract, expand, or remain in the relatively normal aperture you can see above. It would probably mean that the sun that had formerly been searing off the white sheets would now bore a hole right through the back of my head, but the cornea at least would stop rejecting. This was the theory. In the actual surgery they were going to try and peel off the scar tissue to get the iris flexible again, but once they got in there they found the scar tissue had permeated the iris, and so out it had to come. Leaving me with a left eye that looked a little bit like this:
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| The left eye, pleasantly green due to dye (flourozine) and good lighting. As you can see, there is little sign of an iris now. The sutures, though, are clearly visible. I'm not sure what all that red stuff is around the base of my eyelashes, though. Note that the sclera is healthy and white and the arteries that fill it are healthy and red. And such lovely highlighting! |
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| Slightly closer in. I don't know what the significance of the line of light bisecting the cornea is, but once again look how vital, alive, healthy and refreshed the eye looks! The sutures, some of which have come out since these were taken, are still clearly visible. |
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| Closer approach still. Amazingly, I could see my way around reasonably well at this point, and only needed a slight assist from the nurses to get my way around. Gaws knows how the cornea looked when I was at home and not able to get out the front door, watch TV or cope with my parents. |
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| Another, closer approach. The graft looks as shiny and healthy as hair on a shampoo ad, but look at all that black and red stuff in the lower left-hand corner. What the hell is all that? Well, prsumably it's not doing me any harm. |
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| Closest approach. Note the end of the suture where it's grafting the cornea and endotehleum together. I think it's the endotheleum. It might be the epitheleum. Epi, endo, what does it all mean? Note also the orangey veins just above the left hand suture. Is this vasculrisation of which they have spoke? That dendritic growth looks kind of creepy. Damn good job on the sutures, though. |
Last revised: Monday March 28, 2011 04:45:07 PM