CT Scan Number 2

I just got back from St Paul’s hospital where I picked up the data from my second CT scan. For those people living in a cave, last November some guys tooled me pretty good outside a bar and ended up fracturing several bones in my face, including the orbital floor of my left eye. What this basically meant is that there was little to no support for my left eyeball in my left socket. That was November 4th.

On November 22, I went in for plastic surgery to correct the defect under my eye and put my eye back to its proper position. They do this by sticking in a plastic sheet that is meant to hold the eye up while the bone slowly regrows under the sheet. After the surgery everything looked pretty good, but at around the one week mark, my eye started looking more like it did pre-operatively.

My doctor decided to wait a month to see if some of the problems were associated with intra-orbital swelling from the surgery, but unfortunately after four weeks everything was exactly the same. So, at the beginning of February I had my second CT scan. Most people don’t realize that they have full access to their medical records, including data on X-Rays and CT Scans. I’ve kept most of my lab work results at home over the years, and managed to figure out the (stupid) procedure at St. Paul’s for acquiring digital data. Normally they have this 30 day waiting period before you’re allowed to get access to it (nobody was able to tell me why), but thankfully I managed to run into a friendly young nurse tonight that decided to help me out and give me the data early.

I also found a pretty cool open source CT viewer called OsiriX. It can read DICOM data which most hospitals use nowadays for X-Rays, MRIs and CT Scans, so it’s a pretty versatile piece of software. Once I figured out how to scale the data properly, I got a good look at my eye socket.

As you can see in this picture, the implant supporting my left eye (which looks like my right eye in this photo) doesn’t appear to be in the correct position (it should match the angle of the bone under my other eye). What this means is that my eye is sitting slightly lower than it should, and that some of the muscles on the bottom of the eye are slightly out of place (which probably is contributing to my double vision).

On Wednesday I’ll meet with my plastic surgeon and see what he wants to do. Considering there doesn’t appear to be much intact bone to rest the implant on, I’m not sure what they’re going to do. I’ll give an update once I find out.

I’ve added a few slices here if anyone wants to step through them one at a time.