Dr. Blue Eyes

Oh hey there! Yep, you guessed it. I'm baaaccckkk! I realize that it has been one month since I last posted, but that's all going to change. Now that the worst of my surgery is over, I can now get back on track with my writing and blogging ventures. The last month has not been an easy one. It has presented several hurdles along the way. In the midst of those hurdles, I've learned a lot about myself, my family, my friends and well...to be honest, good ol' Dr. Blue Eyes has learned a lot about me too.

Let me back up a little to 3 weeks ago when I had my first hurdle. You see, 3 weeks ago I woke up with red, swollen, itchy eyes. As if this wasn't a big enough problem when I'm supposed to be getting up to drive my daughter to school.  When I got up to inspect the problem, I also noticed lots of little red bumps all over my forehead. It looked like someone had punched me in the face. How in the heck was I going to take Caylee to school looking like this? Yeah, no worries my husband had to e-mail his professors and tell them all that he would be missing class on this particular day. Instead of sitting in class, he was Driving Miss Courtney (and Caylee). It was kind of nice for a change to be honest, but the conditions under which he was forced to do so were awful.

Throughout the day, I took Benadryl and kept ice on my eyes praying that the swelling would go down and that it was just a fluke, but no such luck. Later that night, as I was talking to my husband I noticed that he was looking at me funny. Okay, funnier than he usually looks at me. He then noticed that I had a red outline on every one of my incision sites. Are you kidding me? As if this nightmare wasn't bad enough already...now it looked like I totally lost a fight with Freddy Kruger. My incisions were all itchy, red and raised and my eyes looked like someone punched me in the face. You've got to be kidding me! The Benadryl wasn't even touching my symptoms.

At this point, I'll be honest, I freaked out a little. Okay, maybe I freaked out a lot. So I called the Neurosurgeon on call, which happened to be a nice gentleman by the name of Dr. Carver. When I told him what was happening he told me that it sounded like I was having what they call a silastic allergy. This meant that my body was reacting to the silicone tubing that they had just replaced. At this point, I thought that someone was playing a cruel joke on me. You've got to be kidding right? Dr. Carver continued asking me questions about the surgery that I had just endured and other medical history. When I told him that I had my last tubing for 30 years, the phone went silent. I thought the man had hung up on me. Come to find out, he was just in shock. Enough shock that after we ended our first conversation, he called me back 3 additional times to make sure that I was serious about how long I had my previous tubing. In the final call he told me that I needed to make a follow-up appointment for the following day with Dr. Blue Eyes. Okay, no problem.

The following day I called the office and was told to come in immediately. Once I got to the office they showed me back to my waiting room right away. I know, you have to be just as shocked as I was that I got in so quickly. To make a long story short, Dr. Blue Eyes came in to see me. He checked out my now only slightly swollen, red, itchy eyes and decided that I was not having a silastic allergy reaction as Dr. Carver had predicted, but that I was allergic to something that they used during surgery, to which we have no idea what that could be. He checked my incision sites and sent me on my way.

I was hoping that the worst was behind me. Clearly, I was wrong...dead wrong. I'll explain the rest in my next post so stay tuned.